POL101Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Vanguardism, Arab Spring, Party System
Social Movements and Political Change
● The limits of progressive extractivism
○ All extractivisms are extremely vulnerable to boom-bust of commodity prices
■ Tend to encourage corruption, inequality of costs/benefits
● States have to act as negotiating partners with transnational
corporations
○ Ex: ecuador has to negotiate with chevron to get oil out of
environment and into cars
● Corruption due to behind the doors negotiation
● Marginalized people, minorities, children, etc. do the work in
extractive industries
■ ‘Collateral damage’ to environment, other aspects of economy
● Oil and mines industries don’t employ many people, don’t have
dual-use technology, don’t have requirements for a secondary
economy, etc.
○ ‘Progressive’ extractivism = democratization of consumption in short term but
doesn't challenge fundamental power dynamics
■ Continues the great acceleration
● Post WWII era, contamination of atmosphere, etc
■ Dependent on progressive governments
● Rather than distributing revenue to social programs
○ Ex: In Brazil, they opened up formerly protected parts of
the amazon, and loosened the restrictions on slavery for
people working in those opened up parts
■ Reproduces the developmentalist worldview of the Anthropocene
● Nature is an object
● Myth of endless growth
● Ignores the unevenness of impacts (political ecology)
● Social movements and political change
○ Introduce social science approaches to studying social movements
○ Examine the role of the state in tactics and constitution of movements
○ Understand social movement as living embodiments of structure-agency debate
● Why do movements emerge?
○ Spectrum: protests, insurrections, revolutions, movements
○ Protests: specific events usually in response to a negative situation, long-
standing exclusion, inequality, etc
○ Insurrections: reaction to an established order, armed protests
○ Revolutions: full scale radical and rapid change in an existing political order
○ Social movements: aspire to include protest, insurrections, and revolutions. It’s
the instrument to carry out protests, insurrections, revolutions, reforms, etc.
■ Social movements have constituencies, organization, duration (have life
cycles, moments of birth, period to figure out what tactics are appropriate,
etc), and goals
■ Collective challenges to elites, institutions, other people
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● Movements are more than retweeting something, posting on
facebook, etc. involve more than one person, involve collaboration
○ Traditional theories
■ Ideology:
■ Deprivation: it’s because people are upset, feel pushed out of politics, feel
they aren’t getting their fair share of economic growth and being
discriminated against in the job market
● Relative: Less concerned with the absolute markers of political
exclusion, economic poverty, banned with inequalities. Doesn’t
matter if people are poor or not, it matters if people are dirt poor
and look across the street and see rich people and can compare
their lives too, and that’s where grievances come from. They see
people living in better conditions relative to their own
● Absolute: poverty, people pushed to desperation will mobilize for
change. If you economically deprive people from being able to
feed themselves and their families, they will
● Aspirational: worst one, have a group of people seeing
themselves to be superior, their quality of life is improving, their
income is growing, everything is on the rise, then a regime change
or some big event happens, you’ll have a disgruntled population
who thought they were on the path to success until that event
happened
○ People feel like they ought to be on an upward trajectory
then that trajectory is blunted
○ Ex: nazi’s in germany, WWI happens,
■ Mass psychology
● Gustave Lebon, The Crowd
○ For every crowd, you have a leader with incredible power
who can tell this group of aggravated individuals to go do
something and they will do so. When you're in a crowd,
you lose all thought and calculation
● Sigmund Freud Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
○ Social movements are so powerful because when we
operate in a crowd, a collective, we don’t obey any rules
● What do movements do?: Resource mobilization theories
○ Basic condition of modern life means grievances and discontent are constant;
necessary but not sufficient for mobilization
■ All of these theories from the early 20th centuries of why there are social
movements, scholars say complaints are necessary but not sufficient, we
need to have a complaint
○ Participants are rational actors
■ They know there are costs and benefits in engaging in the pressures of
social movements
■ Members are recruited
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
All extractivisms are extremely vulnerable to boom-bust of commodity prices. Tend to encourage corruption, inequality of costs/benefits. States have to act as negotiating partners with transnational corporations. Ex: ecuador has to negotiate with chevron to get oil out of environment and into cars. Corruption due to behind the doors negotiation. Marginalized people, minorities, children, etc. do the work in extractive industries. Collateral damage" to environment, other aspects of economy. Oil and mines industries don"t employ many people, don"t have dual-use technology, don"t have requirements for a secondary economy, etc. Progressive" extractivism = democratization of consumption in short term but doesn"t challenge fundamental power dynamics. Post wwii era, contamination of atmosphere, etc. Rather than distributing revenue to social programs. Ex: in brazil, they opened up formerly protected parts of the amazon, and loosened the restrictions on slavery for people working in those opened up parts. Reproduces the developmentalist worldview of the anthropocene. Ignores the unevenness of impacts (political ecology)
