Social Movements and Strategy: Suggestions Toward a Cultural-Marxist Reconstruction.

This paper takes up four issues relevant to the study of strategy and strategizing in social movements, namely, the units of analysis are for understanding movement strategy; the definition of strategy and strategizing; mediations among levels of analysis; and the relation of social movement studies to social movements themselves. Drawing on Marxist and Marxist-influenced work such as the literary theory of Bakhtin and Volosinov, the political economy and writings on strategy of Gramsci and neo-Gramscians, and the cognitive and developmental psychology of Vygotsky and his students, as well as kindred developments in pragmatist sociology, the paper offers a synthetic view of how to understand social movement strategies as learning processes linked to actors' efforts to coordinate relations within structured settings. In emphasizing that social movements are best seen as networks with the real potential (immanence) to change structured inequality, the paper outlines challenges that analysts face in joining their insights to movement efforts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]