Dialect Anthropol

DOI 10.1007/s10624-016-9430-9

Considering the urban commons: anthropological

approaches to social movements

Ida Susser1,2

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Here, I review the particular strains of anthropology over the past 50 years that have
provided the fundamental approaches to social transformation. I argue that recent
forms of commoning need to be taken into account in the formulation of an
anthropological theory of social movements. First, I discuss the activist background
of most anthropologists studying social movements. Next, after outlining three main
themes of progressive anthropology, the paper considers the ways in which
anthropology has provided alternative visions of social relations with respect to
gender and egalitarian societies and how these resonate with contemporary visions
of horizontalism and the commons. The main body of the paper, then, selectively
and a little idiosyncratically, reviews the study of social movements in terms of
what Eric Wolf might have called historical materialism and the frameworks which
have emerged in the interaction of anthropologists with social historians. Finally,
the paper suggests that contemporary commoning reflects the formation of a new
collective consciousness which has shown the potential to take into account issues
of racism, gender and other differential subjectivities. Arguably, the multiple
activisms involved represent the making of a new class or political bloc struggling
to confront the dynamics of inequality in capitalism today.
How can the analysis of social movements over the last century inform our
understandings of today and in what ways do we need to reframe our questions to
take into account the changes in the contemporary experience of capitalism? While
most of the theories of social movements were generated in the postwar era of
Bretton Woods and industrial capitalism, movements today are confronting

& Ida Susser

[email protected]
1
Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA
2
695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065, USA

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massively altered conditions. From the 1980s, the U.S. and the centers of capital
have shifted from a reliance on industrial production in the global North to a regime
of flexible accumulation or financialization in the global North and the concentra-
tion of production in the global South (Smith 2011; Harvey 1989). In the process,
the postwar social contract in the centers of capital which allowed workers wages
to keep pace with rising profits and taxed corporations to support the welfare state
has fallen apart. This assault on the working class was facilitated by the
globalization of industry, assisted by rapidly developed informational technology
(Castells 1989). Neoliberal policies of low taxes and unfettered corporate behavior
were accompanied by the privatization of public resources. The new regime of
accumulation was fundamentally based on the development of global cities. As
such, it precipitated new forms of governance including the growth of the incarceral
state, the enclosure of public space and widespread surveillance to address protest
and unrest. The pressing question since the 1980s has been whether or how will
ordinary people confront these changes.
Clearly, since the new forms of flexible accumulation and financialization were
based in cities important for both production and finance it becomes crucial to
focus on urban unrest. In the centers of finance and also in the cities of production
we find new forms of commoning, as in the Squares movements (Susser and
Tonnelat 2013). This article attempts to theorize within the anthropological context
the urban unrest, occupations and moments of commoning which have occurred in
the cities of the global North, taking into account the major displacements of
populations through economic migration, war and the conditions of post-colonial-
ism which have transformed these cities in the current era.
An emphasis on union organizing was the hallmark of research on social change
over the affluent years from the 1950s to the 1970s. In the centers of capital, the welfare
state and the industrial unions subordinated populations by gender and race, but social
movements around these issues, widespread in this era, were seen as ameliorating
rather than raising fundamental issues. However, as feminists noted early on
(Bookman and Morgen 1988; Susser 2012, 1985, 1991; Lamphere 1987; Brodkin
1988) production and social reproduction were always closely integrated and even
industrial unions depended on that integration. We probably need to see the changes
from Fordism to post-Fordism as a continuum, where the affluent years reflected a
stronger reliance on union organization and the neoliberal era precipitated movements
with greater reliance on support from other forms of organizing, including feminist
and anti-racist movements and as Lefebvre (2003) might say, the urban street. From
the 1980s on, as unions came under attack, precarious work became more widespread
across occupations and income, and the reliance on broader coalitions of production
and reproduction (for example as described by Collins 2012 and also Kasmir and
Carbonella 2014, Susser 2012, 1985, 1991) became central. The following pages
explore studies which might help us to better pursue an ethnography of social
movements of the neoliberal era.

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Activism

The study of social movements reflects an approach to anthropology that is oriented

to social transformation. In this respect, many of the intellectuals studying social
movements were conducting scholarly research in the hope that the questions they
asked and the analyses they generated would themselves contribute to social justice.
Like Stanley Diamond, the founding editor of Dialectical Anthropology,
anthropologists and social historians studying social movements in the post-World
War II era, saw themselves as political activists, partly as a result of their war
experiences (as with Eric Wolf and others) and partly as a result of their close
connections with third world anti-colonial movements. The British social historian,
Eric Hobsbawm, was personally involved in the left struggles in Vienna before
Hitlers entry into Austria and his activism, like that of Wolf, was generated in the
heat of the holocaust. Diamond strongly identified with the struggles in Biafra and
Nigeria, accompanied relief flights to Biafra and visited Chinua Achebe in Biafra
during the Biafran war of the 1960s. Eleanor Leacock was involved in the civil
rights movement and feminism. One of the issues constantly in the background here
is the way in which the writers themselves were public intellectuals contributing to
social change. As Gavin Smith (2014) points out:
I think by the 60s and into the 70s it became possible to design a research
project explicitly to aid in insurrectionary politics: to begin by addressing the
question, How can we advance the power of ordinary people in the making
of their own history? I am not saying that such an agenda was blazoned
across the dust covers of such books, but if we think of the particular way
Peter Worsley (1968) set out the questions he wanted to answer in his study of
idiosyncratic uprisings in the Pacific; or of Georges Balandiers similar work
in central Africa (1988); or of Eric Hobsbawms Primitive Rebels (1959); and
then of Eric Wolfs Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (1969)if we
think of any of these works, we quickly realize that they were produced in a
setting of what Edward Thompson called dissident intellectuals, and that
this dissidence didnt only mean criticizing the orthodoxy of a discipline, but
also making an intellectual contribution to popular struggle in a fairly direct
way.
Throughout his life, Gramsci, as a quintessential organic intellectual, combined
activism and theory and the thinking of Antonio Gramsci was central to this new
group of dissident intellectuals, In fact, his discussion of hegemony and anti-
hegemonic movements provided the groundwork for understanding such theoreti-
cians as possible agents of transformation. As Stanley Diamond wrote (1988).
Gramsci was not an ideological reductionist; he was a dialectical thinker par
excellence, and saw the process of learning relative to experience. He looked
forward not only to social/theoretical understanding developing among the people at
large, he also anticipated the possibility of intellectuals and artists turning against
hegemonic relations that had confined them, while, perhaps rewarding them, and
joining popular movements (p.279). Gramscis spirit is reflected in the routes

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progressive anthropologists have taken as activist intellectuals but also in the

analysis of anti-hegemonic influences on civil society and ideas as fundamental as
the making of class, race and gender.
Diamond (1988) points out that Antonio Gramsci understood culture and the use
of anti-hegemonic movements against the state. In looking for the analysis of
culture and revolution, he wrote Marx was ambivalent about culture (p. 279).
Antonio Gramsci is in this respect the salient post-marxist thinker. Given his
notion of hegemony as affecting all areas of life under capitalism, he was convinced
that the only way to transform the system was to use it for anti-hegemonic ends.
Obviously, this led to his insistence that the local cross-sections of bureaucratic state
structures could be, so to speak, captured by an alert citizenry, working for its own
interests, and distinguishing them from the state/bureaucratic imperatives. Hence,
by seizing the initiatives in and through the local sectors of the society (schools,
clubs, churches-sodalities in general), a self-educated opposition could develop at
the very heart of the hierarchical polity. (p. 281)
Stuart Hall also noted Gramscis complex analysis of culture and the significance
of nation and history in the much-neglected areas of conjunctural analysis,
politics, ideology and the state, the character of different types of political regimes,
the importance of cultural and national-popular questions, and the role of civil
society in the shifting balance of relations between different social forces in
societyon these issues, Gramsci has an enormous amount to contribute (1986,
p. 8).
Hall (1986) goes on to outline a number of concepts developed by Gramsci which
crucially illuminate the ongoing study of social movements. Particularly significant
among these is his emphasis on alliances among different groups which may cross
class lines to form a political bloc which then contributes to the processes of
transformation. In fact, Gramsci sees the organic intellectual as central to the
framing of the coherent ideologies through which different activisms within such a
political bloc may coalesce. Hall pointed out that Gramscis emphasis on alliances
and his stress on the contingent political moment make space in a Marxist analysis
for the consideration of subject differentiation with respect to race, feminism and
nation. In his discussion of the Southern question, based partly in his own
upbringing, Gramsci was primarily concerned with inequalities within the nation,
but as Hall notes, this provided the opening for a recognition of the significance of
different historical circumstances generating different subjectivities within the
working class of particular nations as well as a recognition of different subject
positions by race and gender. It is in line with these understandings of contingent
historical transformation that we can place the discussions of racism and the racial
project (Omi and Winant 2015; Mullings 2005), marxist/feminism and other
movements, including sexual orientation and even environmental activisms. It is
Gramscis broader perspective on different subjectivities which allows for an
analysis of the multiple fragmented progressive movements which come together
momentarily in such mobilizations as the Squares and form the basis for the idea of
the commons.
Following in the activist tradition, Christine Gailey, a student of Stanley
Diamond, argued in her review of feminist anthropology (Gailey 1998): To be

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feminist, an analysis must include an effort to change the conditions under which
women struggle. Feminist theory that lacks an activist project, according to Gailey,
cannot be defined as part of a feminist project. In considering transformational
politics with respect to both race and gender, Mullings (1996) addressed this
commitment to the intersection of activisms and theory. Nancy Fraser, similarly,
adopts such an approach arguing that to be useful to feminists, an analysis must
include a pragmatic approach which allows for agentive social change (2013).
Following in this tradition, Stephen (1989, 1997) builds on such a feminist
perspective as she demonstrates how political engagement and collaborative work
are crucial to any study of social movements or politics from below. A recent
volume, Feminist Activist Ethnography (Craven and Davis 2013) continues this
trajectory combining analyses of race, gender and activism.

Progressive anthropology

Progressive anthropology has three main trajectories: (1) the analysis and critique of
the current system with all its inequities, wars and suffering, (2) the possible
processes of transformation toward greater social justice and (3) the development of
utopian visions or the possibilities for future more just societies. Karl Marx put all
these together in a dialectical analysis with the transformative expressions of class
deriving from the crises of the capitalist system. However, as many have noted,
Marx had less to say about class formation, social movements or visions for a just
society, than he did about the cycles and structuring of capitalism.
Most progressive analysts have addressed at least the first two of these
trajectories in much of their work at different moments. Although supposedly
incorporated in a dialectical approach, it has always been difficult to address both
structure and process at the same time, whether in Marxian analyses or in
anthropology (Vincent 1986). Anthropological collections from the 1950s to 1970s
which took up this challenge include, famously, The People of Puerto Rico (Steward
1956), Women and Colonization (Etienne and Leacock 1980), and Women, Men and
the International Division of labor (Nash 1983, see also Brodkin [Sacks] and Remy
1984). Historians too have been at the forefront of this approach. E.P. Thompson in
The Poverty of Theory (1995) grapples with structural versus processual analysis in
a witty and brilliant vein. Later, Perry Anderson revisits agency, structure and
process in Arguments within English Marxism (1980).
In terms of the third trajectory, visions of the just society not as much has been
written and very little recently. Among historians, a classic volume in this tradition
would be Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Within
anthropology, we can turn to Diamond (1974), Gough (1959) on the Nayar and
Leacocks (1981) work among the Algonquin-Naskapi, looking for the social
relations and patterns of autonomy in societies without private property and with
different rules of inheritance and authority with respect to women. In line with this
perspective, we can examine Richard Lees work among the San (2012), and
Christine Gaileys From Kinship to Kingship (1987).

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Anthropological discussion of visionary alternatives has been much critiqued for

a supposed romanticization of the primitive. For example, di Leonardo (1998) in
Exotics at Home criticizes anthropologists who have noted the autonomy of women
in egalitarian societies, specifically African women among the San. She suggests
that the emphasis on the independence of San women reflects an exoticized
reification of the powerful African woman. This is a reflection of European myth
with respect to the African other but di Leonardos critique does not explore the
lived forms of resistance of these women in less stratified societies (Leacock 1981;
Susser 2009).
Colonial perspectives on the San people are well-documented in Robert Gordons
(1994) excellent archival work with German colonial records and by Pred (2000) for
Swedish representation of colonial Africa. These studies, similarly, do not engage
the ways people themselves saw their situation. The analyses of Leacock (1981),
Lee (2012) and others are not based on a conception of the primitive as a western
trope but instead engaged with questions about the role of private property in the
structuring of the family. Scholarly archival and ethnographic research on the San
(Lee 2012), the Nayar (Gough 1959) and the Algonquin-Naskapi (Leacock 1981) as
well as works on the Tonga (Gailey 1987) and Lovedu (Brodkin-Sacks 1982)
provided one window into alternative possibilities for non-hierarchical relations
between women and men. The argument that current ethnography continues to
exoticize or primitivize peoples in egalitarian societies misses the materialist point
that societies where private property is not regarded in the same way as under
capitalism may illuminate questions about gendered domination as well as other
forms of exploitation.
Accusations by anthropologists that such studies of small-scale societies in
search of alternative possibilities reflect a hierarchical view of the other, although
clearly accurate in many cases, have dampened an age-old effort of anthropologists
to analyze alternative modes of production and reproduction (which also includes
the French Marxist anthropologists such as Godelier, Meillassoux and Terray) in
pursuit of the comprehension of possibilities for social justice. It should be noted
that none of the theorists exploring egalitarian societies consider them utopian.
Even Trouillot (2003) who has criticized the symbolic rendition of small-scale
societies as echoing the imposition of the savage slot in contemporary capitalism
calls for alternative visions:
We owe it to ourselves and to our interlocutors to say loudly that we have seen
alternative visions of humankindindeed more than any academic disci-
plineand that we know that this one that constructs economic growth as
the ultimate human value may not be the most respectful of the planet we
share, nor indeed the most accurate nor the most practical. We also owe it to
ourselves to say that it is not the most beautiful nor the most optimistic. P. 139
It is axiomatic among progressive anthropologists that the differing modes of
production at different levels of complexity and scale result in different forms of
inequalitiesthat is the premise for the research. Diamonds notion of the
primitive as a set of relations, however, underscores the persistence and
reproduction of a mode of production under the domination of other modes of

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production notably in states (see also Trigger 2006). Gailey demonstrated the
salience of this argument in her analysis of the power of women in kinship relations
as a counterpoint to the state in pre-capitalist societies (1987, 2006). In addition,
Gaileys work among the Tonga in the 1980s and my own, with Richard Lee, in the
1990s and later, demonstrates the ways in which such practices of womens
autonomy may resonate among the Tonga and the San within contemporary
capitalism (Susser 2006, 2009; Susser and Lee 2007; Gailey 1992).
This suggestion leads us directly to consider notions of the commons which may
be found in some continuum in contemporary capitalist societies and specifically
although not uniquely in family relations and among women.

Ideas of the commons

The geographers, J. K. Gibson-Grahams (2006) publications on the commons,

along with the historical work of Linebaugh (2006) and writings of Federicci (2012)
and others have recently opened up an avenue of contemporary research for
horizontalist visions in the present. An anthropological approach which further
investigates the on-the-ground contestations and conditions of such movements for
the commons is currently developing (Nonini 2007; Hart et al. 2010; Susser 2006;
Susser and Tonnelat 2013) and can be seen as one trajectory which combines studies
of social movements with the analysis of alternative images of a just society. Such
work is particularly relevant for current public debates and scholarly research with
regard to questions of communication and horizontality in social movements.
Starting with the alter-globalization protests, activists have demanded horizontality
and contested hierarchical representation in mobilization or among leftist parties
ever more insistently over the past decades (Graeber 2009). The intersection of
social movements with popular visions of transformative futures are most clearly
illuminated by the current Occupy and Commoning movements which demand that
the protesters live the alternative futures in the process of mobilization. Like the
Paris Commune before them, these contemporary movements, with a different
conception of both temporality and futures, need to be integrated into a framework
of social mobilization.
Thus, for those interested in social transformation in the Gramscian sense, the
study of an ecumenical broad section of social movements, including contemporary
communing/commoning, is one important perspective. Social movements in this
formulation can include anything from the small but concerted acts of resistance of
secretaries, laborers or peasants, such as the Blue Monday absences, the womens
bread riots of the early twentieth century, to major labor shutdowns, the Indignados
and Squares movement, or the Black Lives Matter mobilization. The aim is to
develop an understanding of such movements for the analysis of transformation at
different historical moments and, specifically, here in the documentation of
commoning as the creation of a new working class project.
To generate a theoretical framework for the study of social movements, we need
firstly a recognition of the changing regimes of accumulation, from Fordist to post-
Fordist, or neoliberalaccepting that this is an over-simplified description of the

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complex ideologies and global capitalist strategies of the past 50 yearsand

secondly, we need to find a way to describe new and emerging progressive social
movements and how these can be understood theoretically for each era (Smith 2011;
Susser 2011). It is in this second endeavor that the idea of the commons resonates.
I start with the social historians and their students who interacted with
anthropologists from the 1950s and contributed to the rich ethnographic approaches
to transformation that continue today. Next, I review the work of key anthropol-
ogists in the USA and the UK who were in conversation with these social historians
and rethought questions of social transformation in an interdisciplinary framework
for anthropological research. Below, I outline the ways in which the research of
these anthropologists, among many others, created further stepping stones in the
field of social transformation. I explore scholars in terms of generations of
experience and knowledge, rather than in any way comprehensively, which I believe
will illuminate an ongoing effort to understand social transformation and put ideas
of the commons in theoretical context.

British social historians, social anthropology and social transformation

Manchester, the crucible of capitalist industrialization, the site of massive Irish

immigration and powerful union organizing, and of Engels family factory and his
urban ethnography (2010 [1892]), was also a center of discussions among
anthropologists and historians about social movements. In the 1950s, E.P.
Thompson lived in an industrial village on the outskirts of Manchester, teaching
courses outside the university. He declined the editorship of the New Left Review,
which fortunately was taken on by Stuart Hall, in favor of devoting his time to
writing The Making of the English Working Class (1963). The New Left Review,
formed in opposition to the USSR invasion of Hungary in 1956, by Edward and
Dorothy Thompson, Stuart Hall, Eric Hobsbawm, Perry Anderson, Raymond
Williams and others, had founded New Left Clubs, one located in the center of
Manchester, which became popular meeting places. The Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament was a major concern which brought the youth together at the New
Left Clubs nationwide. From the start of the New Left Review, Gramsci was viewed
as a central theorist who brought ways of thinking about culture back into the
structural discussion of class (Hall 1986). New Left theorists were broadening the
ideas of class and culture, taking seriously the dialectical relationship between
cultural production and historical conditions. Thompsons analysis of the making of
the English working class included discussion of non-conformist religious
communities, local newspapers and the organization of weaving in the household.
Raymond Williams analyzed class relationships represented within English
literature. Meanwhile, as mentioned above, they led and participated in mass
movements for nuclear disarmament and other social protest not often classified as
working class struggle.
In the 1960s, Stuart Hall became the first researcher and later director of the
Centre for Cultural and Contemporary Studies at the University of Birmingham and

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founded what has become known as the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. As
John Clarke (2014) has written in his review of Stuart Halls work
Following the work of Thompson (1963) and others, Hall shared an interest in
the making of classes as social forms and political projects (see also Carrier
and Kalb forthcoming). But a second analytic and political move insisted that
classes were never the only social forces or political projects: for example,
gendered and racialized formations of inequality, oppression, and struggle
were also at stake in how people lived their subordinationsand contested
them (Clarke p. 113).
As noted earlier, without abandoning ideas of class, Hall insisted on the
importance of cultural formations around race and gender and other social divisions.
Adolescent subcultures such as mods and rockers (Hebdige 1979) and
rebellious working class youth (Willis 1977) were included in the purview of the
Birmingham School analysis of political culture and social transformation.
In the 1950s, at the same time as the New Left Review was formed, Max
Gluckman, a South African anthropologist, whose parents were part of the Jewish
migration from Russia to South Africa, was appointed the first chair of Social
Anthropology at the red brick University of Manchester (which, at the time, along
with the University of Birmingham and four other major urban universities, was
seen as a public counterpoint to the established elite institutions of Oxford and
Cambridge). Gluckman, although not consistently progressive, inherited the
anthropological project of the Marxist, Godfrey Wilson, and his wife, the
anthropologist, Monica Wilson, who laid out an approach to studying East Africa
as a British imperial project. Possibly relevant is the fact that Gluckmans British
wife, Mary Gluckman was a committed left activist, especially around issues of
anti-apartheid. Although Gluckman rarely used the word capitalism, he developed a
processual approach to anthropology which focused on the transformation of both
city and rural areas by the imposition of colonialism and capitalism. Like Stuart Hall
at Birmingham, Gluckman gathered around him a number of doctoral students
including Victor Turner, Ronald Frankenburg, Bruce Kapferer and others, eager to
develop a critical political anthropology that addressed social processes and political
and cultural transformation. One example of this Manchester School tradition
seldom referred to is Tribal Cohesion in a Money Economy: A study of the Mambwe
people of Northen Rhodesia (Watson 1959) which analyzed the interaction of
capitalism among a rural population. While the approach reflects Gluckmans
emphasis on cohesion, it also reflects Gluckmans insistence on the analysis of
contemporary pressures on the lives of the people of East Africa which included
British colonial power, industrial development, copper mines and migrant labor.
Watson emphasizes the significance of wage labor in the colonial rural economy.
Victor Turners first book, Schism and Continuity (1957), also reflected this
understanding of the importance of both migrant labor and forced labor in political
transformation at the village level. Turner documented a crisis of succession among
the Ndembu created by the interaction of local elites with colonial measures.
Interestingly, illustrating ideas of the making of the working class and the
emphasis on learning and anti-hegemonic influences through institutions such as

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unions, A.L. Epsteins 1958 book on the emergence of a mineworkers union under
the colonial regime of Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia) preceded the publication of
E.P. Thompsons classic, Making of the English Working Class (1963). Epstein, a
member of the Manchester school, argued that the African copper mineworkers of
Lusaka came to recognize themselves as a collective organization, above and
beyond ethnic affiliation, in relation to the colonial owners of the mines. The
African mineworkers union threw over the tribal elders whom the British mine
owners had appointed to supposedly represent their interests. This research led to
the eviction of Epstein from Northern Rhodesia by the British colonial adminis-
tration. Later, Joan Vincent, whose work served as a bridge between the Manchester
School and US historical materialists, published Teso in Transformation: the
political economy of peasant and class in Eastern Africa (1982). Evocative both of
E.P. Thompson, Sidney Mintz and of other anthropologists focused on social
movements, Vincent documents the making of a rural proletariat.
Eric Hobsbawm was invited to Gluckmans departmental seminar and presented
a paper which he notes was the origin of his influential volume Primitive Rebels
(1959). In Primitive Rebels, Hobsbawm (1959) provided a way for anthropologists
to conceptualize the social organization of bandits, urban crowds and other groups
in relation to social movements. He was suggesting that particular forms of social
organization, including bandits, and mobs or street riots, emerged in pre-
industrial forms in resistance to the capitalist political context and were later
mostly superseded by workers invention of unions. If we see the power of unions as
specific to a particular moment, or century of Fordist industrialization, however, we
can understand Hobsbawms argument without the evolutionary expectations and in
a more useful way for contemporary analysis. The publication of Primitive Rebels
inspired critical anthropologists, such as Peter and Jane Schneider and Anton Blok
to analyze the mafia within the historical and political context of a Sicilian village.
Blok (1972) argued that the mafia and other forms of social bandits might have
appeared as Robin Hood in mythology but in fact were not actually seen that way
by the communities who were most familiar with them. At the time, Hobsbawm was
criticized for his assumption that varied forms of community resistance were only
pre-industrial. Among other problems, this seemed to reflect a narrow Marxist
framework where specifically womens organizing in communities was not
recognized (Susser [1982] 2012). Primitive Rebels was, however, a critical
intervention in the study of social movements. Hobsbawms overall approach in
terms of looking for resistance in different pre-industrial or now post-industrial
forms remains crucial today (see also Smith 2014).

US perspectives on social transformation

In the USA, Eric Wolf built on his analysis of peasantry to analyze transformation in
Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, written in 1969 at the height of the protests
against US involvement in the Vietnam War. Here, he made the argument that
peasants in China, Vietnam, Mexico, Russia and elsewhere had rebelled and led
some of the most influential social movements opposed to capitalism in the

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contemporary world. He was convinced that it was the peasants with a family farm
which had been undermined by global capital who joined these uprisings along with
itinerant intellectuals. Wolf did not consider the landless rural proletariat as a
leading force in these revolutions, although this has been much disputed by leftists,
social scientists and others around the world. The significance here for the analysis
of transformation is that Wolf was in conversation with Barrington Moore and many
others in his efforts to draw on anthropological analysis to comprehend the massive
popular upheavals of the twentieth century.
Mintz (1960), Worker in the Cane, reflects a very different angle on social
movements, exploring the experience of Don Taso, a landless sugar cane worker in
Puerto Rico, over his life cycle. Don Taso was an active union supporter when
Mintz first met him, but it was his turn to Pentecostalism that puzzled Mintz and led
him to document Don Tasos life story. While recognized today largely for the
reflexive approach, Mintz ethnography illuminates the significance of historical
contingency and subjectivity in the emergence of collective action. He shows the
ways in which social movements have emerged at different historical moments as
well as at different periods of an individuals life.
If we turn to the work of June Nash, We eat the Mines and the Mines eat us
(1979), we can see this in some ways incorporates aspects of Wolf and Mintz to
develop an approach which recognizes the life cohorts of mineworkers as they
organize at particular historical moments. Nashs ethnography considers the class
position of the miners within a changing Bolivian state and describes the ways in
which they called on traditional cultural symbols to solidify resistance and union
organization. At the same time, she examines the influence of generations as
workers negotiate and reflect upon decades of successes and failure over their work
lives. This is particularly helpful in allowing for the analysis of collective historical
processes combined with individual histories in the emergence and disappearance of
social movements over time.
Millenarian and revitalization movements are another form of popular uprising
often interpreted as transformative by anthropologists and historians. Mooney (1965
[1896]), an early ethnographer who worked under John Wesley Powell at the
Bureau of Ethnology in Washington, DC, documented the great Ghost Dance
Revitalization of the 1870s among the Lakota Sioux. He theorized that the Ghost
Dance, which spread across a multitude of native American groups, emerged as a
wide ranging millenarian movement in response to displacement and starvation and
constituted a form of resistance to the encroachment of western capitalism. It was
the Ghost Dance revitalization which precipitated the battle between US soldiers
and Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee and the death of Sitting Bull. It was the
memory or resonance of that battle, and the massacre of over 20 Sioux, that led to
the powerful re-enactment of the resistance movement at Wounded Knee by the
AmericanIndian Movement one hundred years later.
Mooneys theory was re-iterated in the work of the Manchester school
sociologist/anthropologist Peter Worsley with respect to the revitalization move-
ments of the New Guinea Highlands. The Trumpet Shall Sound, Worsleys (1968)
historical ethnography, develops a hierarchy of revitalization movements in colonial

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New Guinea which he suggests reflect increasing resistance to capitalist/colonial

interventions.
In the era of globalization, the Ghost Dance has been reconsidered in the analysis
of Rastafarianism (Price et al. 2008). The discussion of revitalization and
millenarian movements may be pertinent to addressing the current uprisings
typified by the international demonstrations of 2011, including the Arab Spring/
Indignados/Wisconsin protests/Occupy. In each case, broad popular uprisings
emerge in which people live the future in their occupied settings while they demand
major structural changes. In their possibly massive failures, as well as partial
successes, these cases demonstrate the drawbacks of separation from a party or
union structure, but perhaps tell us something else about the historical resonance of
such movements over time, as Christopher Hill demonstrated with his analysis of
the Diggers and the roots of democracy (1972).
Nash (2001) consistently concerned with social movements, published an
ethnography of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, which has been understood as the first
uprising of the anti-global movements of the 1990s. It precipitated early global
efforts to combat the neoliberal era which was implemented in Mexico after the
fiscal crisis of 1982. Here, she deconstructs the idea of contemporary Mayan
peasants as longtime peasant villagers and describes the wandering of landless
people from one area to another to settle on arid land allotted by the government.
The peasants are no longer connected by lifelong ties of kinship and community,
but, along with itinerant and unemployed scholars and activists, they build
communal links to develop a movement which, temporarily, highlights their plight
and enlightens the world about new ways to confront neoliberalism. We have here
again a reference to the itinerant scholars and intellectuals described by Wolf in
Peasant Wars and documented in Hobsbawm and EP Thompsons historical work.
Although there was much emphasis among Marxist sociologists in the USA on
the structural analysis of capitalism (Burawoy 1979; Wright 1989), many
anthropologists followed E.P. Thompsons critique of Althusser in The Poverty of
Theory (1995) and tended to adopt a historical materialist approach closer to the
historians (Schneider and Schneider 2003a, b). Again, Gramsci was seen as a way to
address this question. Taking up Gramscis approach, with its emphasis on
education and civil society, Schneider and Schneider (2003a, b) followed the anti-
mafia movement in Palermo in their book, Reversible Destiny. An analysis of an
anti-mafia movement starting in the schools and broadening throughout Palermo
and the rest of Italy, this urban ethnography of Palermo indicates ways in which, in
the neoliberal era, the mafia were not seen in any way as social bandits but rather as
destructive of community. Tied in with construction contracts and neoliberal
gentrification, the mafia did not represent working class interests except through
their hold on construction jobs (Schneider and Schneider 2003a, b). In this case, the
mafia can be understood as intertwined with the elite classes and furthering the
growing inequality and polarization of the rich and poor in Palermo. The anti-mafia
movement represented an effort at a broad class alliance which was necessary to
address the powerful interconnections between the mafia and the ruling elite.
Following a classic anti-hegemonic approach as outlined by Gramsci, the movement

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counteracted cultural hegemony and fear by working through the educational

system, involving students, teachers and parents.
In some ways, the anti-mafia movement in Palermo can be compared to other
movements such as those in Wisconsin in 2011 (Collins 2012) which have
combined workers who might be seen as involved in social reproduction such as
nurses, teachers firemen and police in organizations with those whom they serve.
Again, the institutions of the state, health care and education, along with unions, can
be important locations of anti-hegemonic learning and generate large scale
movements. Such movements are clearly reflected also in Spain with the White
Tides representing massive mobilizations of doctors and health care workers, and
Green Tides representing educational workers, which, along with the May 15
Indignados in the city squares, protested privatization in Spain. In New York City,
the combination of OccupyWallStreet with the longterm anti-gentrification
movements, the right to the city and the mobilization against Stop and Frisk
was also, if only momentarily, transformative, and led to the surprise election of
Bill de Blasio, an activist and a progressive outlier, as mayor in 2012 (Susser 2014,
n.d.).
Recently, in terms of unions and labor organizing, we find a merging with studies
of social movements in new ways, more cognizant of the interaction of production
and reproduction, race, immigration and gender and the merging of social
movements with labor uprisings than earlier traditions of labor analysis (Mullings
2005, 2010; Kalb 2014; Kasmir and Carbonella 2014; Narotzky 2016; Collins 2012;
Lem and Leach 2002). In fact, this has been an ongoing development since Morgen
and Bookmans (1987) feminist anthology, Women and the Politics of Empower-
ment which argues cogently for such an approach. Mullings (2005) argues that in the
neo-liberal era new forms of racism have emerged. As a result, we need to look for
the emergence of new forms of anti-racist social movements of which Black Lives
Matter may be one manifestation. As globalization has changed the population of
Europe, the Squares movement in Spain and elsewhere, and Nuit Debout in France,
as well as recent organizing in Greece, attempt, both theoretically and in practice, to
address questions of displacement, the undocumented, and refugees (Susser 2015).
In addition, issues of gender have become central, as women and LGBT groups take
leadership and reframe many issues.
Conceptualizing current efforts at horizontality and struggles for the commons as
moments of social vision and practices of transformation (Susser 2006; Susser and
Tonnelat 2013; Nonini 2007; Harvey 2012; Maskovsky 2015) leads toward a
recognition of the common goals and overlapping modes of mobilization in the
recent era. Thus a concept such as the commons allows a recognition of the
fragmented nature but joint mobilizations of the ecological movements, as well as
groups addressing the questions of gender, displacement, immigration, race, sans
papiers, and refugee status as they have actually come together in squares and
occupations in many places.
The commons and commoning contribute to social transformation as alternate
ways of relating and forms of horizontalism become real if momentary experiences.
Occupations and other modes of protest in the urban street, as well as squatting and
more long-term efforts at solidariy, not only resonate with historical experience but

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also help to create visions and goals for social justice in the future. We can
understand them in terms of Gramscis concept of processes of transformation. With
such a broad range of global movements in mind, the significance of the commons
as a political bloc incorporating multiple activisms becomes clear. We can see the
making of a broader selfconscious working class, or new political bloc, which can
address local and historically contingent specific issues among different subject
populations as well as cohere in the critique of massive questions of inequality.

Compliance with ethical standards

Conflict of interest The author declares that no conflicts of interest.

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