Social Movements. Donatella della Porta

2011, p. 24)

      Another fundamental force of change has consisted of the massive entry of women into the paid labor force. Within Western societies, the phenomenon has been particularly pronounced in the service sector, which suggests a relationship between dematerialization of the economy and increased opportunities for women (Castells 1997, p. 163). This process has affected lines of differentiation and criteria for interest definition within social groups, which were previously perceived as homogeneous. Continuing wage differentials between men and women represent, for example, an obvious source of division and potential conflict within the salaried classes. At the same time, and not only in the Western world, the combined impact of women’s growing economic independence and professional commitments has shaken the base of patriarchy both at home and within the professions and created opportunities for the development of even deeper gender conflicts in the private sphere.

All these processes have weakened the structural preconditions that had facilitated the emergence of a class cleavage, particularly in the working‐class model of collective action. Overall, the size of social groups which lack full access to citizenship and its entitlements has grown, whether because they are migrants (legal or illegal), employed in the hidden economy, or engaged in low‐paid work. The sense of general insecurity has been further reinforced by the growth of individual mobility, principally horizontal, as more people tend to change jobs several times in the course of their life – whether out of choice or out of necessity (Castells 1996). The multiplication of roles and of professions and of the related stratifications, and the (re)emergence of ethnicity, generational or gender‐based lines of fragmentation within socioeconomic groups have made it more difficult to identify specific social categories. The greater frequency of job changes and the weaker links with territorial communities have also made relationships among those who once shared the same structural condition more unstable and fragmentary. As work seems to be gradually losing its collective nature, a process Manuel Castells has defined as “individualization of labor” (1996, p. 265), it is more difficult to deduct actors’ interests from their structural position, and to organize their protection on that basis (Dalton 1988, Chapter 8).

2.2 STATES, MARKETS, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

      Politics and the state have experienced relevant changes. State action is capable of producing collective actors in at least two ways: by fixing the territorial limits of political action (i.e. setting borders); and by facilitating or blocking the development or the growth of certain social groups – depending on the priorities of public policy, and in particular on the destination of public spending.

      2.2.1 Globalization and Protest

      Structural processes influence the territorial dimension of conflict. Traditionally, social movements have organized at the national level, targeting national governments. Today’s national protests are more often accompanied by transnational ones, in a process of upward scale shifts, as changes in the territorial level of action (McAdam and Tarrow 2005). The relationship between economic activities and geography has changed too, in the sense that such activities are increasingly transnational in both “strong” and “weak” sectors. The importance of the multinationals has grown: the emphasis on the international division of labor has facilitated the transfer of activities with high environmental risks to the poorest areas. Decentralization of production went hand in hand with the centralization of economic control, with the merging of firms into larger and larger corporations.

Although the process of global interdependence has its roots in the distant past (Wallerstein 1974; Tilly 2004a, Chapter 5), the technological revolution of the 1980s contributed to intensifying “both the reality of global interdependence, and also the awareness of the world as one single unit” (Robertson 1992, p. 8). In the economic system, growing interdependence has meant the transfer of production (in economic theory, the “delocalization of production processes”) to countries with lower wages; a strengthening of multinational corporations; and especially the internationalization of financial markets, to the extent that some speak of an “economy without borders.” Global economic interdependence has been a factor in pushing large numbers of people from the South and East of the world to its North and West, but also in transforming the division of international labor by deindustrializing the North (where the economy is increasingly service oriented) and industrializing some areas in the South (in particular in Latin America and Central Asia and now also in eastern Europe), where the economy used to be based on the export of raw materials.

      The contractual capacity of trade unions has been significantly weakened by the threat of moving production to locations with lower labor costs. Economic globalization has also raised specific problems around which actors, both old and new, have mobilized. In the world’s North, it has brought unemployment and especially an increase in job insecurity and unprotected working conditions, with frequent trade‐union mobilization in the agricultural, industrial, and service sectors. In the South, too, the neoliberal policies imposed by the major international economic organizations have forced developing countries to make substantial cuts in social spending, triggering fierce protests (Walton and Seddon 1994; Eckstein 2001; Ayuero 2001). Again, already weak political regimes have often allowed the private exploitation of natural resources as well as development projects with major environmental impact. Native populations have mobilized against the destruction of their physical habitat – for instance, via the destruction of the Amazon forests or the construction of big dams, often sponsored by IGOs such as the World Bank or the IMF (Yashar 1996).

      Traditionally, political action in the industrial society presupposed a specific concept of space and territory, which translated into the model of the nation‐state. Having the monopoly of the legitimate use of force in a certain area, the state fixed its borders, and thus the “natural” limit of the complex of much wider relationships conventionally defined as society. Social relationships were, in the first place, relationships internal to a particular nation‐state. There were, admittedly, many communities within states that were endowed with specific institutions and forms of self‐government, but they were considered to be largely residual phenomena, destined to disappear as modernization processes advanced (Smith 1981).

      Relevant collective actors were, at that time, those social groups able to influence the formulation of national policy: for example, groups with central economic and professional roles, or organized labor. Political and class conflict tended to be seen as a conflict between social groups defined on a national scale, and concerned with the control of national policy making. The existence of conflicts between the center and the periphery that were not based on class issues did not belie this perception: minority nationalities, groups bearing a particular cultural, historical, and/or linguistic identity, defined their strategies and their own images in reference to a central state and to the dominion which the state exercised on their territory, and they often aimed at building their own nation‐states. In this case, the goal was not concerned with national policy but rather with the modification of the borders of the nation‐state. However, actors did define themselves in terms of the state and its borders.

The correspondence of nation‐state and society is nowadays weaker than it was in the past. In this sense, economic globalization has called into question not only the role of the nation‐state, less and less capable of governing within its own borders, but also, in more general terms, the capacity of politics to intervene in the economy and regulate social conflict. Global capitalism has in fact breached the longstanding historical alliance among capitalism, the welfare state, and democracy (Crouch 2004). The shift from Keynesian‐driven economics – with the state playing an important role in governing the market – to neoliberal capitalism implied a reduction of labor protection as well as workers’ rights (Brecher, Costello, and Smith 2000). Even left‐wing governments have espoused the liberal concepts of flexibilization of the workforce and cuts in social spending.

      Overall, the capacity of the state to regulate behavior within a certain territory has clearly lessened. First, the importance of territorial political structures within single states has grown. In most cases