Movements, Class and Capitalism: The political economy of contentious politics

The Great Recession has pointed attention back to social conflicts and their, more or less institutionalized, political expression. While the political effects of inequalities are more and more debated inside and outside academia, the analysis of the relations between economy and politics, state (broadly understood) and market need innovative toolkits to be analysed. As the debate on classes had disappeared from many subfields of knowledge in the social sciences, and the analysis of capitalism had been confined within specialized circles, the need to understand  complex transformations pushes towards multidisciplinary approaches. While neoliberalism and its crisis brought about much discontents, often expressed in disruptive forms of protests, social movement studies and political economy studies have remained apart from each other. In fact, capitalism as a concept and research topic had been marginal in both fields. Only during the crisis, some social movement scholars and critical political economists have pleaded for a return of attention to the social basis of contentious politics. In this presentation I aim at bringing capitalism back into the analysis by singling out some common trend in the 2011 wave of antiausterity protests. Using the conceptualization of social cleavages, I will in particular look at the social basis, the political interactions and the organizational forms of those protests. Based on field work  research on the Italian case and secondary analysis of social science analysis on the Indignados movements in Spain and Greece and the Occupy movement in the US, I will especially pointed at the similarities that characterized this wave of protests.