Social Movements — Sociology STD 12 Humanities — Question

There are different kinds of social movements.Social movements can be classified in different ways:

1. One way of classifying is:

1. Redemptive.
2. Reformist.
3. Revolutionary.

2. Another way of classifying is:

1. Old.
2. New.

1.  

1. A redemptive social movement aims to bring about a change in the personal consciousness and actions of its individual members. For instance, people in the Ezhava community in Kerala were led by Narayana Guru to change their social practice.
2. Reformist social movements strive to change the existing social and political arrangements through gradual, incremental steps. A reforms movement attempts to improve conditions within an existing social system without changing the fundamental structure of the society itself. Reforms are often linked with belief systems, rituals and life styles of the concerned people. There are several examples of reform movements in India. The 1960s movement for the reorganization of Indian states on the basis of language and the recent Right to Information campaign are examples of reformist movements. These movements brought about remarkable changes in the life of the people.
3. Revolutionary social movements attempt to radically transform social relations, often by capturing state power. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia that deposed the Tsar to create a communist state and the Naxalite movement in India that seeks to remove oppressive landlords and state officials can be described as revolutionary movements.
4. Most movements have a mix of redemptive, reformist and revolutionary elements.
5. The orientation of a social movement may shift over time such that it starts off with, say, revolutionary objective and becomes reformist. A movement may start from a phase of mass mobilization and collective protest to become more institutionalized.

2. Old and New:

• For much of the twentieth century social movements were class based such as working class movements and peasant movements or anti-colonial movements.
• While anti-colonial movements united entire people into national liberation struggles, class based movements united classes to fight for their rights.
• The most far-reaching social movements of the last century thus have been class-based or based on national liberation struggles.
• There were workers' movements in Europe that gave rise to the international communist movement.
• Besides bringing about the formation of communist and socialist states across the world, most notably in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, these movements also led to the reform of capitalism.
• The creation of welfare states that protected workers' rights and offered universal education, health care and social security in the capitalist nations of Western Europe was partly due to political pressure created by the communist and socialist movements.
• The movement against colonialism has been as influential as the movement against capitalism. Since capitalism and colonialism have usually been inter-linked through forms of imperialism, social movements have simultaneously targeted both these forms of exploitation.
• That is, nationalist movements have mobilized against rule by a foreign power as well as against the dominance of foreign capital.
• The decades after the Second World War witnessed the end of empire and the formation of new nation-states as a result of nationalist movements in India, Egypt, Indonesia, and many other countries.
• Since then, another wave of social movements occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s, this was the time of the war in Vietnam where forces led by the United States of America were involved in a bloody conflict in the former French colony against Communist guerrillas.
• In Europe, Paris was the nucleus of a vibrant students' movement that joined workers' parties in a series of strikes protesting against the war.
• Across the Atlantic, the United States of America was experiencing a surge of social protest.
• The civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King had been followed by the Black Power movement led by Malcolm X.
• The anti-war movement was joined by tens of thousands of students who were being compulsorily drafted by the government to go and fight in Vietnam.
• The women's movement and the environmental movement also gained strength during this time of social ferment.
• It was difficult to classify the members of these so called 'new social movements' as belonging to the same class or even nation.

Rather than a shared class identity, participants felt that they shared identities as students, women, blacks, or environmentalists.