Social Class and Environmental Movements: A Comprehensive Overview

Social Class and Environmental Movements

Introduction

Social movements often mobilize individuals from specific social groups, basing claims on grievances, interests, and identity.
While this fits labor, women's, anti-racist, and LGBTI movements, it's less obvious for environmental movements, which seek to mobilize individuals from different social groups for causes benefiting humanity at large.
Environmental activists are often portrayed as middle class and well-educated.
Environmental movements' demands for natural preservation and ecological sustainability have been claimed to conflict with the interests of the working class.
Demands for "environmental justice" have become more central for environmentalists, framing socio-economic inequalities as intrinsically connected to environmental problems.
This chapter investigates the class composition of environmental movements, using previous research and data from environmental protests to analyze this composition historically and today.
It also discusses the possible causes and consequences of environmental movements' class composition.
The chapter discusses class mainly in terms of occupational class, i.e., the individual's position in the stratified labor market.
Previous empirical research about the actual class composition of environmental movements is quite scarce.
Survey studies have been conducted since the 1960s to determine movements' socio-demographic profiles.
Protest survey data will be used for comparing the class composition of environmental protests in a number of countries during the 2010s, including the 2019 Global Climate Strike protests.

Delimitations

The study mainly discusses the social class of those being mobilized to environment-related political participation ("action mobilization") but not how class matters when environmental movements seek support for their views and claims ("consensus mobilization") (cf. Klandermans 1984).
It primarily discusses collective actions carried out by actors self-identifying as environmentalists, leaving out local or specific campaigns and mobilizations focusing on aspects of the environment (natural, urban, workplace, etc.) without framing this as part of an overall environmental struggle.
The main focus is thus the modern environmental movement, which since the 1960s has widened its scope from conservationism to issues like environmental pollution, nuclear energy, climate change, and environmental justice (Rootes and Brulle 2013).
The study mainly discusses environmental movements in the Global North due to lack of statistical data on environmental protesters' occupational class in other parts of the world.
Recent data from the World Values Survey (WVS) is used to analyze the class composition of members in environmental organizations in the Global South in order to briefly discuss class differences in environmental activism across the globe.

Social Class and Social Movements

Conceptualizing Social Class

The classical sources for theories of social class are the writings of Karl Marx and Max Weber.
Both saw the individual's employment situation as central to this type of social stratification (Wright 2009).
Most subsequent conceptualizations of social class are indebted to their terms and perspectives.
Marx's notion of class was central to his understanding of capitalist society, describing how conflicts between wage-laborers and the owners of the means of production over the organization and outcome of production determine the distribution of wealth and power.
Weber understood class primarily as a “market situation”, through which competition on the labor market stratified the life chances of different groups of wage-laborers, a hierarchy-creating process in which education and other forms of qualifications played decisive roles.
Marx distinguished wage-laborers only sharing an objective common situation (“class in itself”) from those developing a political identity and agency connected to common class interests ("class for itself") (Marx 1846-1847/1975).
Marx described the proletariat and the bourgeoisie as the main class protagonists (e.g., Marx and Engels 1848; Marx 1867/1990), others include more detailed analyses of the political role played by various intermediary classes (Marx 1852/1984).
Weber (1922/2019) distinguished “class” from both “social rank”/“status” (prestige, lifestyle, and honor) and “party” (power and politics) as analytically distinct forms of stratification without necessary interconnections.
During the twentieth century, the concepts and theories of Marx and Weber were developed further in various empirical studies of social class.
Empirical research analyzing socio-economic stratification only in terms of educational level or income has been quite common.
These indicators tend to correlate with class positions, they are nevertheless conceptually different from class positions.
Much of the statistically oriented research on social classes that emerged since the 1960s has been based on Weber's conceptualization of class (e.g., Goldthorpe and Lockwood 1963; see also Wright 1979 for a model drawing inspiration from both Marx and Weber).
These class schemes were based on different occupations' and managers' degree of control over the work process, resulting in a hierarchical classification of occupations allowing for empirical classification in survey-based research.
A parallel development was the increasing attention paid to more multi-dimensional differences between class segments: for example, Gouldner's (1979) notion of the highly educated “new class" being divided into a technical intelligentsia and social-humanistic intellectuals.
This has inspired the development of new class schemes for survey-based research, adding further dimensions to the traditional hierarchical division.

Oesch Class Scheme

The class scheme created by political sociologist Daniel Oesch (2006a; 2006b) is used.
Originally developed for studies about how social class affects political party preferences, Oesch's two-dimensional class scheme combines the Weberian idea of a hierarchically stratified labor market with a new horizontal dimension – namely, sector-wise differences within the labor market that arise due to different sectors' dominant "work logics".
Due to the expansion of the middle classes in developed economies, horizontal distinctions within these classes become increasingly important for understanding political preferences.
Traditional left-right division of the political spectrum often correlates with the hierarchical class division between manual workers and specialized employees; politics has become increasingly structured by conflicts over socio-cultural values.
Among wage-laborers, Oesch (2008) distinguishes between organizational, technical, and interpersonal work logics, while the work logic of the self-employed and employers is characterised as independent.
The main idea of this two-dimensional class scheme is that political preferences and behaviors are shaped by both hierarchical stratification (due to different economic interests) and sector differences in work logics (due to predominant modes of social interaction and educational socialization into specific "work roles”).
Support for Green parties is much greater among specific sectors of the well-educated middle class (socio-cultural professionals and semi-professionals), while it is lowest among specific sectors of the working class (office clerks).

Class and Movements within Social Movement Theory

Early European theorizing about social movements saw the mobilization of individuals into political action as deeply connected to class dynamics in society (von Stein 1850/1964; Sombart 1896/1968), and the concept of social movement almost exclusively denoted the labor movement.
Class was quite absent when North American scholars studied social movements and collective behavior during the early twentieth century (Park and Burgess 1921; Blumer 1939), with a few rare examples of studies of the connection between class and political mobilization among workers and farmers (Heberle 1951; Lipset 1950).
Scholars studying the effects of socio-economic stratification on participation in protests and revolutions used concepts like “relative deprivation” or “strain”, focusing on status change rather than on the role of occupational class (e.g., Geschwender 1968; Smelser 1962).
The connection between class and social movements was an uncommon theme when a more coherent field of social movement studies emerged in Europe and North America from the 1960s and onward (della Porta and Diani 2015), with a few exceptions (e.g., Tilly 1978).
The role of class for contemporary movements was more thoroughly discussed by the "new social movement” theorists in Europe (Buechler 1995).
This approach centered on the dynamics of the transformation from industrial to post-industrial societies and on the macro-level societal role of the protest wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Alain Touraine (1969/1971, 1978/1981), the original proponent of this approach, interpreted the protests of "Mai 68” as the harbinger of the demise of industrial society, but also as the weakening of the prominent socio-political role that the workers' movement and industrial workers had previously played during modernity.
The activists of "the new social movement” were based in the more advanced and knowledge-oriented parts of the economy and belonged to a “new class