Southern Cone Student Movements and Capitalist Development in The Late 1800s and Early 1900s: A 'New Social Movement Theory' Approach

This paper explores the “new social movement” features of the Argentinean, Chilean, and Uruguayan student movements of the late 1800s and early 1900s. In doing so, it wrestles with two questions. First, why do such features, widely associated with post-industrial societies, appear at this relatively early stage of capitalist development? Second, what does their presence at that time suggest about the explanatory power of new social movement theory? The paper agrees with new social movement theorists’ contention that capitalism shapes the character of social movements but argues that the focus of the analysis should not be on development stages but rather on the impact of rapid global market integration processes, which have occurred at different times since the rise of capitalism. Such an approach illuminates why capitalist development may yield similar collective action patterns across different historical periods.