Читать книгу Social Movements - Donatella della Porta - Страница 20

The austerity policies implemented during the financial crisis, which from the United States spread to Europe around 2008, have triggered an intense wave of protest, against cuts in public expenditures that added up to privatization of public services and the deregulation of financial and labor markets. Intensifying especially in 2011 in the so called ‘Occupy movement’, contention has diffused globally in the following years, involving also countries which, as Brazil or Turkey, had been considered on the winning side of neoliberal developments (della Porta 2015a, 2017a).

Beginning with Iceland in 2008, and then spreading to Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, and the United States, among others, protests targeted the corruption of the political class, seen in both bribes in a concrete sense, and in the privileges granted to lobbies and collusion of interests between public institutions and economic (often financial) powers. In the years to follow, most recently in Perù, Brazil, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, France, citizens took the street against what they perceived as a corruption of democracy, defined as source of inequality and people’s suffering.

Data collected on the social background of those who protested do not unequivocally confirm either the thesis of the mobilization of a new precariat, or that of a middle‐class movement. In all protests, a broad range of social backgrounds is represented, from students, to precarious workers, manual and non‐manual dependent workers, petty bourgeoisie and professionals. Over‐proportionally young in terms of generation, the protests also see the participation of other age cohorts whose high educational levels do not correspond to winning positions in the labor market. As Goran Therborn (2014, p. 16) noted, in different combinations, the critique to neoliberalism came from pre‐capitalist populations (as indigenous people), extra‐capitalist “wretched of the earth” (as casual laborers, landless peasants and street vendors), but also workers and emerging middle‐class layers. In sum, an alliance needed to develop between pre‐capitalist populations, fighting to retain their territory and means of subsistence; surplus masses, excluded from formal employment in the circuits of capitalist production; exploited manufacturing workers across rustbelt and sunbelt zones; new and old middle classes, increasingly encumbered with debt payments to the financial corporations – these constitute the potential social bases for contemporary critiques of the ruling capitalist order.

Anti‐austerity protests developed indeed during the Great Recession. Beginning in the 1980s, the core capitalist states experienced a turn toward more free market in so‐called neoliberal capitalism and then its crisis. First, the United States and Great Britain, led respectively by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, moved toward cuts in the welfare state as justified by an ideology of the free market. As increasing inequalities and reduction of public intervention risked depressing the demand for goods, low interest rates were used, in a sort of private Keynesianism, to support demand – ultimately fueling the 2008 financial crisis. In fact, in that year, the failure of Lehman Brothers produced such a shock that governments decided to come to the rescue, with increasing government debt. Given economic decline in the United States and United Kingdom, coordinated market economies like the EU and Japan – where firms rely more on non‐market relations to manage their activities – seemed to demonstrate equal or even superior competitiveness as compared to the liberal market economy, which relies for coordination on competitive market arrangements (Hall and Soskice 2001; Streeck 2010). However, that form of capitalism also moved toward more free market and was hit by the financial crisis. This could be seen especially in the EU, where the trend toward welfare retrenchment was aggravated, especially in the weaker economies, by the monetary union that (together with the fiscal crisis) increased inequalities both among and within member states. With the abandonment of Keynesian types of intervention, which assigned leading functions to fiscal policies, the monetarist orientation of the EU policies – with the renunciation of full employment as a goal and the priority given to price stability – was responsible for the type of crisis that developed in the union (Scharpf, 2011; Stiglitz, 2012, p. 237). The European Monetary Union (EMU) created in fact particular problems for countries with below‐average growth, as interest rates proved too high for their economies.

In 2008, the evidence of the crisis at the core of capitalism became dramatic as the attempt to develop public demands through low interest rates showed its fragility. Some countries (with traditionally weak economies) were indeed much harder hit than others. In rich states as well, however, neoliberalism had the effect of exponentially increasing social inequalities, with a very small percentage of winners and a pauperization of the working class, together with a proletarization 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).