ABSTRACT
Within liberalism, including recent cosmopolitan reformulations, social movements are granted a role insofar as they can be reduced to their formal, organized, public dimensions such as parties, interest groups, NGOs, and international NGOs. Marxists of various hues have recognized that movements are socially generated, socially embedded political forms that are not reducible to their institutionalized manifestations. Moving onto "new times" approaches in social and political thought, those adopting a postmarxist perspective retain an anarchistic emphasis on the role and significance of diverse aspects of movement activity. The anarchist claim that participatory movement forms prefigure wider democratic possibilities finds backing in feminist arguments. In addition, early second-wave feminists assert that movements enable women's political agency. The feminist movement has generated critiques of the citizen and the worker as specifically masculine constructs that function to marginalize women's political agency.
