The year 2011 saw many protests take place around the globe, most notably in the US with Occupy Wall Street, in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region with the Arab Spring and in Spain with the Indignados and with other European countries such as Greece and Italy following its example. In her latest book Social Movements in Times of Austerity: Bringing Capitalism Back into Protest Analysis, social movement scholar Donatella della Porta draws similarities between these movements, calling them anti-austerity movements or movements in the crisis of neoliberalism. What these protests had in common was not only a reaction to the economic crisis and austerity politics but also a lack of trust in politicians. The protesters demanded a change in politics, which they saw as corrupt, undemocratic, and immoral. The politicians were seen as unable or unwilling to level the effects of the economic crisis of 2008 and instead chose to bail out banks from bankruptcy. Della Porta takes an ambitious step towards bringing back socioeconomic structures to social movement studies by looking at the long-term transformations in capitalism and their connection to protests. She analyses recent protests by bridging social movement studies with political economy and democratic theory aiming at theory building. The data consist of document analysis, interviews, and surveys from the Global Justice Movement (GJM) and anti-austerity protests from (especially Southern) Europe. There is also secondary data from protests from the US, Egypt, and Tunisia. Della Porta’s aim is ‘not a systematic cross-national comparison, but rather the understanding of the ways in which movements are affected by the shift between expansion and crisis of a certain capitalist transformation’ (p. 19).
Social movement studies emerged from a critique towards the economist attempt to analyse protest as deriving from social structure, in contrast to the ‘old’ labour movement. Since the study of political contestation and protest has diverted attention from relations between social structures (class) and political participation and has instead concentrated on protesters’ (rational) action and their political opportunities and available resources – in one word, on the ‘how’ of the protest. Although one might note that there has also been criticism for social movement studies being too much concentrated on structures and too little on action and culture. This shift occurred with the emergence of the ‘new social movements’ in the 1960’s: ‘Fordism was – seen as bringing about a pacification of class cleavage that left space for the emergence of a new type of claim, based not on socioeconomic grievances but on post-materialist values’ (p. 8). New social movements, such as environmental and feminist movements, have been labelled as middle-class movements, thus, seemingly, making class analysis obsolete. This has been a theoretical lack in social movement studies and one della Porta is now tackling. With the protests labelled under anti-austerity, class has also re-emerged due to empirical evidence of the heterogeneous socioeconomic background of the protesters due to the pauperisation of the lower classes and the precarisation of the middle classes. In other words, ‘protests of 2010+’ bring the language of class back in social movement studies.
Della Porta approaches the socioeconomic heterogeneity through the concept of cleavages, understood as main social conflicts that are socially, culturally, and organisationally structured. If the social basis for old social movements was industrial workers, for new social movements it was new middle class, and for anti-austerity movements, it is (hypothetically) the precariat (p. 17). Della Porta’s approach bridges cleavage theory to social movement studies as the aforementioned theory has thus far been concentrated on formal instead of informal politics and as it does not explain how cleavages become politicised. The classic example of this is Marx’s distinction between class in itself and (a politicised) class for itself. According to della Porta, people must feel the effects of the economic crisis and austerity politics in their own lives but mobilisation also requires the framing of responsibility, identity building, and available mobilisation resources – all of which are the core themes of social movement studies.
According to della Porta, the main challenge for social movement studies is linking the structural viewpoint of capitalist transformations to citizens’ agency and it is the explicated main task of her book. She uses political economist model of transformations in capitalism divided into three temporalities: long-term, mid-term and short-term changes focusing however on recent trends in neoliberal capitalism. Della Porta also uses Karl Polanyi’s theorisation on two organising principles in society, one of economic liberalism and the other of social protection – the temporal movement and the counter-movement of capitalism.
In addition to changes in time, another axis used in the book is the geographical division of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system theory and its concepts of core, semi-periphery and periphery. Neoliberalist policies were first introduced in peripheral countries in the 1970s spreading to semi-peripheral and finally to core capitalist countries. Della Porta criticises Polanyi’s and Wallerstein’s approaches for giving a too simplistic and structuralist picture of the birth of an anti-systemic movement, rising automatically from capitalist crises among those most affected by cuts in public spending and reduced social protection. Social movement theory brings us closer to agency and gives a less deterministic view of the complex mobilisation process. According to resource mobilisation theory stemming from social movement studies, and against the assumptions of Polanyi’s counter-movement and world system theory’s anti-systemic movement, the social groups with more symbolic and material resources are easier to mobilise. While the labour movement’s mobilisation was based on the close proximity of the workers in the workplace and in neighbourhoods, today’s ‘unemployed or precarious people, the poor and the marginal, even when highly hit by economic crises, are rarely embedded in mobilizable networks’ (p. 44). How is it then that the latest protests did mobilise this group of people? While not giving a definite answer to this question, the volume gives some preliminary analysis.
Della Porta sees the emergence of the anti-austerity movements of the 2010’s as rooted in the GJM of the turn of the Millennium. The comparison between these movements was, in my reading, the most useful and insightful part of the book, as the data coverage is extensive and the empirical findings are intriguing as such. The movements are compared in terms of their social base, identities, and organisational forms. There are some continuities, but also significant differences between these movements, which della Porta assigns to the different stages of capitalism, with the anti-austerity protests located to the crisis of neoliberalism.
The comparisons between the movements’ social base are most pivotal to the questions asked in the book, resulting in three key points thereof. First, especially in the MENA region and Southern Europe (according to della Porta, in the semi-periphery of capitalism), the protests were characterised by precarised workers, as well as highly educated and well-connected young people with high levels of unemployment or under-employment. In contrast, in the US (core of capitalism), the protesters included in particular members of the impoverished middle classes, such as indebted former students. Thus, there are continuities between the two waves of protest as their cores consisted of people from similar social bases: people with symbolic resources, as social movement studies would suggest. Second, there are, however, noteworthy differences between the two movements as in the movements in the crisis of neoliberalism it was not only the educated youth on the camps or acampadas, but also previously protected groups such as public servants, pensioners, and blue-collar workers, ‘united by their feeling of having been unjustly treated’. Especially in Latin America (in the periphery of capitalism) where the protests first began, the ‘downtrodden’ and marginalised groups were largely present. Thus, if the GJM could still be described as a new social movement, consisting of young, well-educated middle classes and with an overrepresentation of members of the social work professions, the latest protests saw the rise of the (new) losers of the globalization, or neoliberal and anti-austerity politics. In other words, if the GJM was a ‘movement of movements’, the movements in the crisis of neoliberalism also mobilised newcomers and the unusual suspects outside already existing movements. And third, one answer to the puzzle of the immobilisable margins is that the protests consisted of class coalitions, with presumably previously active people at the core.
Material conditions or cleavages as such are not enough to bring about mobilisations but, according to social movement studies, an identification process is needed (Chapters 3 and 4). Della Porta defines identity as a group process: as non-fixed, changing in (inter)action and during the evolution of the movement. However, in the analysis, the concept of framing is used, leaving the reader slightly baffled as the concept or its connection to identification process is not explained. However, the findings offer an interesting comparison of the latest movements. If the GJM, with its ‘democracy of the forums’, had framed itself as a movement of minorities, the anti-austerity protests, with its ‘democracy of the squares’, saw themselves as a movement of the majority, ‘the 99%’ or ‘the citizens’. National symbols such as country flags were used instead of the ‘cosmopolitan rainbow flag’ of the GJM but in an inclusive manner. Materialist values, such as claims for state intervention to economics, were combined with culturally inclusive, ‘post-materialist’ values and claims relating to for example migration issues.
A relevant frame in the identity building of the anti-austerity movements has been the discourse of immoral neoliberalism as trust in public institutions and representative democracy has decreased since the GJM. If the GJM used deliberative democracy and aimed to build coalitions with leftist parties, the anti-austerity protests had an increasing detachment from institutional politics. Instead, they developed direct models of democracy, practising their own vision of democracy in a prefigurative form. Della Porta discusses these changes and renames the Habermasian crisis of legitimacy as a crisis of responsibility, as neoliberal policies of privatisation and deregulation decrease state competencies and rights of citizens.
Della Porta has addressed the recent protests under the question whether we can talk of a return to class cleavage. This is indeed a central question relevant not only in social movement studies but social sciences in general. However, the reader is left to wonder whether a slightly different approach – one concentrating more on an analytical reading of the data than on discussing at the level of grand theories – would have given the book a better balance. Now, regretfully, the analysis remains rather descriptive. The theoretical debates could have been bridged to the analysis even more rigorously; now they remain slightly separate sections in the chapters. Also, one wonders whether these theories are too coarse for this type of fine-grained analysis. For instance, there is a claim that a country’s location in the world system has an impact on the intensity of protest as the protests in the MENA region were more dramatic and intense in nature compared those in Europe. However, the theory is not able to explain the variation between countries that belong to the same category in the capitalist world system as della Porta herself acknowledges.
There are some interesting findings in the survey data analysis that are not expanded upon. For example, in the countries where the crisis hit the hardest, such as Spain, protesters’ self-identification in lower-class positions is stronger. Another finding based on the data is that the young precariat rejects class-based identifications and does not want to take part in traditional labour protests. These are not surprising results but nonetheless pivotal to the central questions of the book and could have led to further openings and discussion. Also, one important aspect that is only mentioned in passing is that the protests were less where the state kept more control over the market. Comparisons between different welfare regimes might have proved useful, as well as a discussion on the political/protest cultures of the countries in question.
Are class cleavages back in protest culture? Della Porta’s conclusion is that class in its traditional form is not back, but the anti-austerity protests did build a connection between the old labour and the new precariat, as well as between materialist (state intervention) and post-materialist (inclusive citizenship) values. In all, Social movements in times of austerity is an important opening and the reader is left waiting for a more systematic cross-national analysis, as the author herself calls for.