Political Economy and Social Movements

Abstract The analysis of the interplay of capitalism and politics—in other words, political economy—played an extremely important role in many of the seminal, English‐language studies of social movements and revolutions written by social scientists during the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Paige 1975; Schwartz 1976; Piven & Cloward 1977; McAdam 1999). These studies had the effect of radically reorienting the academic study of movements, revolutions, and political conflict generally. The field moved away from primarily psychological and social‐psychological treatments of political protest—studies that often cast a very negative light on protest—to more sympathetic analyses that emphasized the importance of resources, power, solidarities, and opportunities for movements. But all this is now common wisdom among students of movements. What has been largely forgotten is that these same studies tended to emphasize the effects of capitalism on movements. The dynamics of capitalism figure prominently in these studies, sometimes constraining and sometimes inciting or enabling disruptive collective action. By capitalism, these authors generally mean a mode of production in which a class that owns the means of production (capitalists) employs a class that must sell its labor power in exchange for a wage or salary (workers), and in which market competition among capitalists leads them to reinvest part of the surplus (or profits) in the production process (i.e., capital accumulation). The dynamics of capitalism that these authors emphasize include processes directly linked to market competition and capital accumulation, especially the proletarianization (or commodification) of labor, the commodification of productive forces generally, the concentration and centralization of capital, and periodic crises.