Class, nation and identity - Jeff Pratt

Political movements across the world have such diverse characteristics and aims that it is difficult to examine them as a collective group. Movements that are class-based are usually portrayed as economic categories of people driven by material interests. By contrast, ethnic or national movements are represented as resulting from cultural interest, generated by emotion, and have to be studied by looking at the complexities of identity formation.;In this work, Jeff Pratt argues for the need to set up a new analytical framework that examines all political movements form a rounded perspective that takes in both the class dimensions of identity politics and ethnographic analyses of economic and social processes. He argues that political processes involve two linked components: a "discourse" (an identity narrative which positions us within social history) and a "movement" (the process of organization whereby local social divisions are transformed by their incorporation into a national movement). He illustrates his arguments with a mix of case studies from across the last century including Basque nationalism, Andalusian anarchism, Italian communism, and Serbian chaos to the "newer" political movements in Europe, in French Occitan and the Italian Lega Nova.