Page 126 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

112 Social Movements

mobilization and political opportunity structures. In some respects, then,
Melucci is concerned to work out a synthesis of RMT and NSMT, but
his emphasis on culture and the importance he gives to struggles in civil
society make his work very much closer to the latter tradition than to the
former. Furthermore, the way in which he has developed Touraine ’ s ideas
brings Melucci explicitly within the terms of the cultural turn. Although
he does not use the term “ cultural politics, ” Melucci ’ s view of social
movements as engaged in the contestation of collective identity in the
practices of everyday life is clearly akin to the understanding of cultural
politics developed in this book.
For Melucci, Touraine ’ s theory that there is a single progressive social
movement in every societal type is a clear case of the typically mistaken

view of social movements as personages – unified actors playing out a
role on the stage of history. In his view, this idea comes from the workers ’

movement which was relatively unified in terms of its aims, the spaces in
which it operated, and its membership among male manual workers.
Contemporary social movements, however, are inherently plural; they
consist of different levels of action – from political confl icts, narrowly
defined, to defensive reactions and challenges to the codes of everyday life

– and also of different groups of actors with different reasons for their
involvement in collective action. Melucci gives the example of mobiliza-
tion against a proposed nuclear power station in a rural area, arguing
that for the peasants of the community it may represent a threat to tra-
ditional ways of life, while for a group of young people who have returned
to it from the city, it may symbolize something quite different, for example,
a threat to their right to live autonomously (Melucci, 1989 : 203 – 4).
In Melucci ’ s view, the most important point about collective action is
that a more or less stable, composite, collective identity – a “ we ” – must
be constructed out of very different ends, means, and forms of solidarity
and organization. It must be understood as an ongoing process through
which actors communicate and negotiate the meanings that produce the
social movement as such. It is, of course, also Touraine ’ s view that social
movements are the product of social action; as we have seen; however,
he re - introduces structural determinism when he interprets collective
action in terms of its capacity for leading the transformation from one
type of society to another. In such a case, it seems that the actors do not
necessarily recognize the “ highest meaning ” of their action until it is
brought to their attention by the researcher. For Melucci, on the other
hand, social actors must know the meaning of their actions, even if they
do not know it completely, since collective action is nothing but the mul-
tiple meanings they give to it (Melucci, 1995b ).