Social Movements and Capitalist Models of Development in Latin America

Social movements are crucial actors in producing transformations in society. One important dimension in this regard is certainly capitalism. The goal of this chapter is to analyze social movement dynamics across the capitalist models of development that predominated in Latin America from independence from colonial rule until the early twenty-first century. This is done through the lens of a political economy of social movements, understood as the substantive and theoretical recoupling of the political and economic spheres in the relational study of social movements and capitalist dynamics. If an economically determinist approach is avoided and the North Atlantic mainstream narrative is decentered, a political economy of social movements reveals multiple struggles for the expansion of the socio-political arena and the resistance to this expansion with plutocratic retrenchment periods that contract that arena. In Latin America there has been an enormous development of research since the 1980s linked to protest and the transformations of capitalism. However, this accumulated research has not yet been systematized into models of development to understand the impact of capitalism on social movements, and even less so, the role played by social movements and protests in economic change.