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Research on labor movements has also focused for long on its weakening, at least at the core of the capitalist world (see also Chapter 8). If the decline of strike activities could be interpreted as a sign of institutionalization of the industrial relations and depoliticization of the industrial conflicts, especially since the 1990s, the decline in union membership has been quoted as an indicator of an unavoidable crisis of the labor movement. Also in the service sector, a fragmented social base is hard to organize, especially with the growing flexibilization of the labor market and the connected increasing insecurity. And the more and more numerous unemployed and migrants were also difficult to mobilize.

At the beginning of the new millennium, however, conflict on labor issues again seems to be on the rise, although in new forms of anti‐austerity protests, as workers have organized in the South, where unions often increased their membership (Norris 2002, pp. 173 ff.) and grassroots networks linked workers transnationally (Moody 1997). New grassroots unions emerged (see below), and traditional unions started to invest more on the mobilization of the workers – for instance, the AFL‐CIO started to invest as much as 30% of their budget in organizing (as opposed to the usual 5%) (Fantasia and Stepan‐Norris 2004, p. 570). While labor demobilized in the private sector, in the public sector workers voiced their opposition to neoliberal reforms that cut social services (Eckstein 2001). As Piven and Cloward (2000) noticed, in the United States there has been a return to old forms of secondary action such as community boycotts, sympathy strikes, and general strikes. In France (but also in Italy and Spain) the turn of the millennium has been characterized by general strikes against pension reform, privatization of public services, cuts in public health and education. In these actions, the trade unions were joined by various movements, bridging labor issues with global justice, defense of the environment, peace, and gender equality. The claims voiced during anti‐austerity protests were oriented at the defense of those rights, which had developed in the 1960s and 1970s in the first world with liberal democracies, but also in the Third World with the developmental states, or in the second world with the really existing socialism – rights to housing, health, education, job (della Porta 2017a).

The spread of a frame of global injustice has indeed been perceived as another recent tendency in the labor movement. The NAFTA free‐trade agreements produced increasing transnational campaigns of Canadian, United States, and Mexican workers (Ayres 1998; Evans 2000). The dockers of Seattle, who had already taken part in a transnational strikes started by the dockers in Liverpool (Moody 1997), supported the protest against the WTO, extending their solidarity from the local to the international level (Levi and Olson 2000). In these waves of mobilization, the labor movement met other movements – environmentalist, feminist, urban, etc. (della Porta, Andretta et al. 2006). Moreover, increasing inequalities stimulated the rise of solidarity movements with marginal groups in the North (Giugni and Passy 2001), as well as protest by marginal groups themselves (Kousis and Tilly 2004).

In political economy, the analysis of the neoliberal financial crisis in the Great Recession brought about a revisitation of Karl Polanyi’s double movement, which singles out a shift, in capitalist development, between social protection and free market, through the action of movements and counter‐movements. Polanyi’s work has been in fact referred to in order to stress similarities or differences between the first great transformation he studied and what we can call the second great transformation. Polanyi’s analysis focuses attention to some specific forms that the counter‐movement, as the mobilization of those who feel betrayed by changes like those produced in neoliberalism, can be expected to take. Conceiving countermovements as a reactive move, he points in fact at the ways in which these mobilizations develop as defensive and backward looking. In this perspective, he looks at the first wave of liberalism during which protections for the poor, what E.P. Thompson (1971) calls “the moral economy of bread,” were taken away and this produced a rebellion not only against poverty but also against a betrayal of esteblished rights.

According to the scholars of the so‐called world system approach, it was the task of antisystemic movements to resist against greedy capitalism, opposing the logic of the system. As Immanuel Wallerstein noted, ‘to be antisystemic is to argue that neither liberty nor equality is possible under the existing system and that both are possible only in a transformed world’ (Wallerstein 1990, p. 36). The concept of antisystemic movements builds on an analytic perspective about ‘the world‐system of historical capitalism’ that gave rise to them, as ‘class and status consciousness were the two key concepts that justified these movements’ (Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein 1989, p. 1). Research often noted the diminishing structural power of workers, but this is not true in newly industrialized countries as labor unrest emerges as endemic to capitalism as it wants to commodify labor. As Silver and Karatasli (2015, p. 137) remarked, “from both Marxian and Polanyian perspectives, labor unrest should be expected anytime and anywhere we find the commodification of labor: sometimes at the point of production, sometimes in political struggles over regulation of the labor market, sometimes in the form of open resistance, but at other times.” In fact, two types of workers’ struggles have been described: a Marx‐type labor unrest by newly emerging working classes; and a Polanyi‐type labor unrest, with established working classes defending their ways of life and livelihood, which are under attack (Silver 2003). These have been described also as struggles against accumulation in production versus struggles against accumulation by dispossession. Besides those on the working places, struggles also address the background conditions, that capitalist production presupposes (Fraser 2014). Integration in a world economy does not mean equal conditions – or even convergence in all countries – but rather, the division of the world into hegemonic power and dependent economy (Wallerstein 1990). Additionally, capitalism is far from stable: crises of different types (inflation and stagnation, production and distribution) emerge frequently, changing the conditions for political participation as anti‐systemic movement produce adaptation in capitalism (Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein 1989).

Building on Polanyi, Burawoy singled out a sequence of three successive counter‐movements: respectively, for labor rights, social rights, and human rights. While the wave of anti‐austerity protests that developed between 2010 and 2014 were all reacting to a sense of political dispossession face to a separation between popular politics and power, among their characteristics was, however, a focus on domestic conditions, even if within a global consciousness. As he noted, “If these movements were globally connected, it was their national framing that drove their distinctive momentum. They may share underlying economic causes but their expression is shaped by the terms and structure of national politics” (2015, p. 16). The analysis of the relations between movements reacting to commodification or recommodification and movements reacting to ex‐commodification introduces important considerations about some organizational and identity challenges for nowadays protests as a need to go global enters however in tension with the weakening of previous structures of mobilization, linked to conceptions of social protection, that each neoliberal waves brings about.

In a similar vein, David Harvey (2003) pointed instead at the capitalist logic of development and crisis, singling out different forms of accumulation, as respectively oriented to production and to dispossession – the latter reminding of the original accumulation of capital on its need to expand through special relations with noncapitalist social formations. The periodic return to accumulation by dispossession points at “the continuous role and persistence of the predatory practices of 'primitive' or 'original' accumulation within the long historical geography of capital accumulation” (Harvey 2003, p. 144). While the former is based on the exploitation of wage labor and conditions defining the social wage, the latter include the resistance to the most classic forms of primitive accumulation (especially the expulsion of peasant populations from their land, Sassen 2014), but also the withdrawal of the state from its social obligations, the destruction of culture and nature; the effects of financialization (Harvey 2005, p. 203). Accumulation by dispossession and its discontents are linked indeed to the cyclical emergence of profit making through financial speculation as an alternative to profit making through production in order to address the problems of overaccumulation. In fact, access to cheap input (in terms of land, labor and raw materials) is considered as relevant, as the widening of markets, in creating profits (Harvey 2003, p. 145). To these, Harvey adds the predation related to the credit system and financial capital, as through accumulation by dispossession, various assets are released at very low cost (Harvey 2003, p. 149).

The very logic of accumulation is expected to affect the forms of collective mobilization. As different forms of accumulation coexist – in different mix in different countries – this introduces internal tension within social movements, both progressive and otherwise. Recent movements have so appeared bifurcated between mobilizations around expanded reproduction, and mobilization around accumulation by dispossession. Different from the primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession brings about a withdrawal of previous achievements with a (still unfulfilled) need to search for new organizational model. As neoliberalism attacked “all forms of social solidarity that put restraints on capital accumulation” (Harvey 2005, p. 75), the forms that the social movements on the left took in the years 1945–1973, with expanded reproduction in the ascendant, emerged as inappropriate to contrast accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2005, p. 172).

In sum,

Accumulation by dispossession entails a very different set of practices from accumulation through the expansion of wage labor in industry and agriculture. The latter, which dominated processes of capital accumulation in the 1950s and 1960s, gave rise to an oppositional culture (such as that embedded in trade unions and working‐class political parties) that produced embedded liberalism. Dispossession, on the other hand, is fragmented and particular – a privatization here, an environmental degradation there, a financial crisis of indebtedness somewhere else. It is hard to oppose all of this specificity and particularity without appeal to universal principles. Dispossession entails the loss of rights. Hence the turn to a universalistic rhetoric of human rights, dignity, sustainable ecological practices, environmental rights, and the like, as the basis for a unified oppositional politics.

(Harvey 2005, p. 179)