Friday, October 23 2-4pm
Jeff Goodwin and Gabriel Hetland: The Strange
Disappearance of Capitalism from Social
Movement Studies
Abstract: The dynamics of capitalism provided a number of important causal mechanisms in the groundbreaking studies of social movements by English-speaking scholars during the 1970s. However, more recent scholarship on movements and political conflict has, with very few exceptions, largely ignored the enabling and constraining effects of capitalism. Ironically, during a period in which global capitalism became ever more powerful, it also became increasingly invisible to academic experts on popular movements. This strange disappearance of capitalism from social movement studies is a result, we speculate, of the declining influence of Marxism in the social sciences during the 1980s and 1990s, among other factors. The neglect of capitalism might also be explained (and justified) by the fact that the “new” social movements that many scholars have come to study in recent years are not centrally concerned with economic, labor, or work-place issues and thus have nothing or little to do with capitalism. We argue, on the contrary, that even those movements that do not represent classes or make primarily economic demands are still powerfully shaped by capitalism. We illustrate this claim by examining the gay and lesbian (or LGBT) movement, enumerating the main ways in which capitalism has facilitated, shaped, and constrained this “post-materialist” movement.