Search

The recent mobilizations in the Middle East, Southern Europe, and United States were both inevitable given the implosion of global capital, and at the same time unexpected and unpredictable. How are we to understand these mobilizations? This article suggests that NSM, New Social Movement theory, with its concerns for identity, culture, and meaning, in which the transformation of identity becomes the basis of subsequent social transformation remains a useful starting point. But given the contradictions of global capital, as well as developments in social movement theory, there is a need to further consider the importance of the legitimation crises of the political economy migrating to the subjective realms of identity and emotion that impel mobilizations that are informed by morality and visions that may be utopian. The Occupy movements illustrate these relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]