10. Notes on Social Movements and Education: Challenges of the Struggle Between Capital and Labour in Brazil

According to Alonso (2009, p. 51): “McCarthy and Zald (1977) are the foremost names of Resource Mobilization Theory (RMT), which they created in the face of the explanations of collective mobilizations in terms of collective emotions, exacerbating the opposite extreme: their rationality. Against functionalism, they argued that, far from chaotic expression of individual dissatisfactions not channelled by institutions, movements, such the Civil Rights movements in the United States, had meaning and organisation”.

When emphasizing the historical character of Tilly's studies, Maria da Glória Gohn (2012, pp. 64, 65) explains: “Although many authors include Charles Tilly's work inside Resource Mobilization Theory (and they have their reasons for this), we think that there must be a differentiation, since it has its own characteristics, a style of essentially historical approach that has turned into a school. Other authors, such as Foweraker (1995), relate Tilly’s work to the paradigm of the New Social Movements. We disagree with this position because Tilly himself highlights the structural character of his analyses and criticizes approaches focused only on issues of identity and the microsocial perspective. What it shares with the NSM paradigm is the issue of solidarity, particularly communal solidarity.”

“After the 1960s, a new pattern of society would have been configured, which Touraine initially calls a “programmed society” and then a “post-industrial society”, in which industry and labour would have lost centrality. Labor conflicts would have been diluted, processed by democratic institutions, through mechanisms such as the expansion of rights, and by capitalist institutions, with mechanisms like wage increases. Domination would have become eminently cultural, made through the control of information by a technocracy. Technique and culture would interpenetrate, the distinctions between the public and private worlds would be clouded, causing conflicts previously restricted to the economic plane to advance to private life (family, education, sex) and gain symbolic dimensions” (Alonso 2009, p. 60).

According to Alonso (2009), in Mellucci's view: “new social movements would then be particularistic forms of resistance, reactive to the directions of socioeconomic development and in search of the reappropriation of time, space and everyday relations. ‘Post-materialist’ challenges, with symbolic motivations and aimed at the construction or recognition of collective identities”.

The MST’s “mistícas”, literally mystiques, are collective ceremonies imbuing a sense of belonging, used as tools for organizing and political action.

This theme was developed in the chapters of João Henrique de Souza Pires and Lais dos Santos in this collection.