If we are going to talk about the most recent of the "Indignados" movements in several countries of the world, including Europe, those are social movements but eventually they will evolve into political movements. This will happen because the traditional bourgeois parties have lost credibility after being the main political influence in most countries of Latin-America and Europe in the last 50 or 60 years.
Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador lived through times of cruel and ruthless capitalism where the workers, the masses of the population, saw themselves living in a precarious state of employment and subsistence conditions. The impact of this reality took hold and impacted the evolution of the social situation of those countries and even though that produced movements that were not exactly political movements but social movements.
What's more important is that we talk about movements; change happens through movements. The movement to end slavery, the movement to bring justice for those who have been left out of the system, movements to include women, movements around sexual preference - all these movements brought about change.
The only continent where social movements have led to political parties that have pushed through serious social and political reforms is in South America.
Multiple political parties are a fact of life throughout Europe and most of the West. Today the only countries without strong multiparty political systems are the United States and a number of third world military dictatorships.
I've always said: if we ignore the issues that people want us to talk about, then you will have movements outside of the establishment political parties grow.
The focus of my research is how secular movements originated in West Asian countries and subsequently changed to pan-Islamic movements. The role of Western countries in this aspect is also a part of the research.
Industrialized countries have disproportionately more cancers than countries with little or no industry (after adjusting for age and population size). One half of all the world's cancers occur in people living in industrialized countries, even though we are only one-fifth of the world's population. Closely tracking industrialization are breast cancer rates, which are highest in North America and northern Europe, intermediate in southern Europe and Latin America, and lowest in Asia and Africa.
We're talking about the Communist Party, the Socialist worker's movement, those movements basically have been underlined. We have other movements, but they're not as powerful as the movements that we had then.
Political and social history are in my view two aspects of the same process. Social life loses half its interest and political movements lose most of their meaning if they are considered separately.
Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua have made a tremendous leap just by rejecting the neoliberal adjustment policies, they are making a statement from the social perspective. Capital in these cases has not been protected in any way which along with non - interference of the state is what neo liberalism stands for. It has gone the other way around; they have looked for social policies from the political movements and then when they have acquired the power of those political movements they have become in charge of the State.
The question is, how do you stop the power elite from doing as much damage to you as possible? That comes through movements. It's not our job to take power. You could argue that the most powerful political figure in April of 1968 was Martin Luther King. And we know Johnson was terrified of him. We have to accept that all of the true correctives to American democracy came through these movements that never achieved formal political power and yet frightened the political establishment enough to respond.
I accommodated practically all of the liberation movements, including those of Latin America.
In every capitalist economy there are anti-capitalist movements, activists, and even political parties; in a way, that there are no longer anti-democratic movements, activists, and parties.
I think that a lot of social movements, political movements, powerful ones - certainly they form, collectively, an idea of the truth which becomes hard to question. It becomes a dogma, and from the inside it starts to look like common sense.
People are less certain of their national identities or their place in the world. It starts looking different and disorienting. And there is no doubt that that has produced populist movements both from the left and from the right in many countries in Europe.
I think strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors. And that is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it's what can see us forward.