Mass Social Movements and Social Class

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Abstract
The paper critically reviews the major class interpretations of contemporary mass movements, including the fascist movements, Polish Solidarity and Western Green (eco-pax) movements, and argues that these accounts are deficient. A paradigmatic shift from the class interpretation of movements to `post-Marxist' and `post-modernist' accounts has been occurring in movement literature. This shift follows the processes of social change and broadening of research horizons. Contemporary conflicts, and the mass movements that articulate them, seem to be more diverse, more detached from structural-economic divisions, and less linked to class identities than the nineteenth-century conflicts analysed by Marx. This limits the heuristic value and theoretical utility of class theories in analyses of mass social movements and brings to the fore alternative accounts in terms of generation, status politics and civil society.