ABSTRACT
South Africa stands at the crossroads of two types of social movements – movements based on unequal inclusion in the major institutions of society and movements based on forcible exclusion from those institutions. Alain Touraine's theory of social movements was also a theory for social movements. At the center of his recast sociological theory were social movements, making history themselves, what he called 'historicity'. The social sciences, however, do not form a homogeneous block. Ironically, economics has created the ideological justification of market fundamentalism – the very force that is destroying the university as an arena for the independent pursuit of knowledge. The profitability crisis of the 1970s led to the expansion of the market through the commodification of labor, money, nature, and knowledge, a combination that varies over time and space. Labor has to be dispossessed from its supports in the state; peasants have to be dispossessed from access to their land.
