Topic: Beyond Social Movements: From Everyday Resistance to Revolution. Essay question – “Critically examine the ways the two concepts of ‘everyday resistance’ and ‘revolution’ can contribute to development of the field of social movement studies. Explain with examples.”
Sociology MA (essay topic on social movements/protest) – Everyday Resistance and Revolution
Topic: Beyond Social Movements: From Everyday Resistance to Revolution.
Essay question – “Critically examine the ways the two concepts of ‘everyday resistance’ and ‘revolution’ can contribute to development of the field of social movement studies. Explain with examples.”
All of us employ the term `social movements’ in such different ways that our debates are often artificial. Even more clearly, historical analyses of the current situation of any given country and of factors favourable or unfavourable to the formation of social movements are almost meaningless. One must therefore replace this exceedingly vague expression by a precise representation of social dynamics.
Without in any way attempting to impose one conception over against others, I wish to examine the historical context of that conception of social life that views it as simultaneously collective action, operation of society on itself, and organized around a central social conflict, opposing those who direct the self-production and transformation of society and those who are subjected to its effects.
This conception cannot be identified with a particular current of thought. Rather, Marxist and post-Marxist thought has long been one of the most widespread expressions of this representation. One encounters this representation every time that the notion of social class is employed (at least as this notion is customarily used in Europe), but also every time that society is defined as industrial — that is, by a mode of production. This is the case even when these expressions are in no way associated with a Marxist form of thought.
INTRODUCTION
All of us employ the tenn ‘social movements’ in such different
ways that our debates are often artificial. Even more clearly,
historical analyses of the current situation of any given country
and of factors favourable or unfavourable to the formation
of social movements are almost meaningless.
One must therefore replace this exceedingly vague expression by a precise
representation of social dynamics.
Without in any way attempting to impose one conception over against others, I
wish to examine the historical context of that conception
of social life that views it as simultaneously collective action,
operation of society on itself, and organized around a central social conflict, opposing those who direct the self-production and transformation of society and those who are
subjected to its effects.
This conception cannot be identified with a particular current of thought. Rather, Marxist
and post-Marxist thought has long been one of the most
widespread expressions of this representation.
One encounters this representation every time that the notion of social
class is employed (at least as this notion is customarily used
in Europe), but also every time that society is defined as
industrial – that is, by a mode of production.
This is the
case even when these expressions are in no way associated
with a Marxist form of thought. The question that arises
with respect to countries that have been considerably influenced by socialist, communist or anti-imperialist forms of
thought, is: can the idea of a central social conflict – which
I here identify with the recognition of social movements -survive what now appears as the irremediable decline of historicist thought, that is, of a form of thought that defined
the social actor by his position in a social progress opposed
by the forces of conservatism and reaction?
This is the essential point: it is surely impossible to dissociate the concept
of social movement, thus defined, from the representation
of social life as, simultaneously, a set of cultural representations through which society produces itself and all the aspects and consequences of a central social conflict.
Thus,
the notion of social movement, as used here, designates a
general representation of social life rather than a particular
type of phenomenon. This representation differs both from
the liberal image of society as a marketplace and from the
identification of society with a central power or a set of
mechanisms implacably bent on maintaining the established
social order.
One can, of course, reject this representation
of social life at the outset. But one cannot deny that it has
been very influential, especially in the twentieth century,
which has been largely dominated, at the international level,
by the association of Marxist parties and movements of social
and, especially, national, liberation.
Our thought is dominated by the crumbling of communist and nationalist regimes
that claimed to be the heirs and representatives of these
social and nationalist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist,
movements.