and to dispossession – the latter reminding of the original accumulation of capital on its need to expand through special relations with noncapitalist social formations. The periodic return to accumulation by dispossession points at “the continuous role and persistence of the predatory practices of 'primitive' or 'original' accumulation within the long historical geography of capital accumulation” (Harvey 2003, p. 144). While the former is based on the exploitation of wage labor and conditions defining the social wage, the latter include the resistance to the most classic forms of primitive accumulation (especially the expulsion of peasant populations from their land, Sassen 2014), but also the withdrawal of the state from its social obligations, the destruction of culture and nature; the effects of financialization (Harvey 2005, p. 203). Accumulation by dispossession and its discontents are linked indeed to the cyclical emergence of profit making through financial speculation as an alternative to profit making through production in order to address the problems of overaccumulation. In fact, access to cheap input (in terms of land, labor and raw materials) is considered as relevant, as the widening of markets, in creating profits (Harvey 2003, p. 145). To these, Harvey adds the predation related to the credit system and financial capital, as through accumulation by dispossession, various assets are released at very low cost (Harvey 2003, p. 149).
The very logic of accumulation is expected to affect the forms of collective mobilization. As different forms of accumulation coexist – in different mix in different countries – this introduces internal tension within social movements, both progressive and otherwise. Recent movements have so appeared bifurcated between mobilizations around expanded reproduction, and mobilization around accumulation by dispossession. Different from the primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession brings about a withdrawal of previous achievements with a (still unfulfilled) need to search for new organizational model. As neoliberalism attacked “all forms of social solidarity that put restraints on capital accumulation” (Harvey 2005, p. 75), the forms that the social movements on the left took in the years 1945–1973, with expanded reproduction in the ascendant, emerged as inappropriate to contrast accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2005, p. 172).
In sum,
Accumulation by dispossession entails a very different set of practices from accumulation through the expansion of wage labor in industry and agriculture. The latter, which dominated processes of capital accumulation in the 1950s and 1960s, gave rise to an oppositional culture (such as that embedded in trade unions and working‐class political parties) that produced embedded liberalism. Dispossession, on the other hand, is fragmented and particular – a privatization here, an environmental degradation there, a financial crisis of indebtedness somewhere else. It is hard to oppose all of this specificity and particularity without appeal to universal principles. Dispossession entails the loss of rights. Hence the turn to a universalistic rhetoric of human rights, dignity, sustainable ecological practices, environmental rights, and the like, as the basis for a unified oppositional politics.
(Harvey 2005, p. 179)
2.4.4 Movements of the Crisis?
When looking at anti‐austerity protests we should consider that they developed in a situation of crisis that took different characteristics at national (and also subnational) level. The Global Justice Movement and the anti‐austerity protests were both addressing neoliberal capitalism but in different moments. Research on the labor movement has often looked at waves of strikes, singling out that picks of protest are usually recorded in times of full employment when the workers are structurally stronger. Moreover, economic growth also implies higher margins for investing profits in increase in salaries and taxes to support welfare expenses. By contrast, in times of economic crisis, unemployment hinders the capacity for struggling for improved salaries and working conditions as well as the resources available for state interventions. Strikes are therefore expected to decline and, when called for, they are more likely to be defensive than proactive (Franzosi 2004).
Also in social movement studies, a distinction has been made between movements of abundance and movements of crisis. In general, social movement studies have considered crisis as particularly unfriendly for social movements. The best that they expect was what Kerbo (1982) called long time ago movements of crisis, which he compared with the movements of abundance, as, for example, the movements from the 1960s and 1970s. In his analysis movements of affluence are to be found in relatively good times; they are often formed mainly by conscience members, and they are better organized and less likely to use violence (Kerbo 1982, p. 654). In contrast, movements of crisis are sparked by unemployment, food shortages, and dislocations, when everyday life is challenged during threatening political and social crises. Their participants are, at least in the early stages, mainly the beneficiaries of the requested changes, and protests tend to be more spontaneous, more often involving violent outbursts. In general, while movements of abundance (and opportunities) are expected to be stronger, larger, longer‐lasting, pragmatic, optimistic, and more often successful, movements of crisis (and threats) are expected to be weaker, smaller, shorter, radical, pessimistic, and more often unsuccessful (della Porta 2013). In this vision, movements of crisis are conceptualized, in a way resonant of Polany, as mainly reactive types of mobilization: weakly organized, they do not have many resources for mobilization. Additionally, they would tend to be more violent and more pessimistic. They would mobilize the affected: not a large supportive constituency, but rather those who are more discontent as the unemployed who is hit in the great recession. Moreover, they have been presented as destined to fail in their attempt to resist changes.
Research on the labor movement has linked different types of mobilizations to these alternations between affluence and crisis. In fact, especially in moments of crisis, legitimacy enters in tension with profitability, so that
Efforts to overcome the tendency toward a crisis of legitimacy through improving the condition of the working class as a whole (rising wages, improved working conditions, social welfare provisions) can only work for short amounts of time or small segments of the working class without provoking a crisis of profitability. If the crisis of global capitalism of the 1970s was largely precipitated by a squeeze on profitability, the current global crisis of capitalism is increasingly characterized by a deep crisis of legitimacy as inequality mushrooms and growing numbers have lost access to the means to produce their own livelihood without being provided with any opportunity to make a living within the circuits of capital.
(Silver and Karataşlı 2015, p. 140)
While comparative analyses of social movements in the European periphery show that it was exactly where the crisis was stronger that it triggered higher levels of activities with new repertoires of action as well as organizational forms and claims, and even able to achieve political success, the reflection on the different challenges for contentious actors in times of abundance versus times of crisis remains relevant (della Porta 2017a and 2017b). As some research on labor activism has pointed at, moment of crisis can indeed trigger the creation of resources of solidarity during protests. The long strikes or the factory occupations, as the camping in the squares or the pickets of the unemployed, that characterized the anti‐austerity protests, should be indeed analyzed as reaction to the crisis that then creates innovative ideas and practices (della Porta 2015a). Gramsci’s organic crises, as crises of hegemony of the ruling class, tend indeed to fuel local militancy that can then converge in campaigns and movement projects (Cox and Nielsen 2013).
Indeed, research on the protests during the Great Recession at the European peripheries singled out several differences. In particular, while Polanyi’s type of countermovements mobilized everywhere, it has been where the socioeconomic crisis had more disruptive effects on the everyday life of the citizens that movements with more innovative characters have emerged. In particular, in countries like Iceland, Greece, and Spain, anti‐austerity protests went well beyond the claims for recovering old rights, developing instead a critique of the hollowing out of social protection, but also of the way in which the welfare state had developed. The very concept of the “common
