There has to be a stricken category

Conflicts and collective action is a result of the fact that power relations are unequal, and that a category can’t protect its civil society in another way. The unequal relations can be
- class relations, or relations of exploitation through the societal organisation of production; one example is the conflict between workers and capital owners;
- elite relations, or illegitimate power relations within organisations, or repression; one example is the conflict between colonizers and colonized; and
- prestige relations, or discrimination of certain categories as less respectable or ”fashionable”; one example is the conflict between ”races”.

All three have existed for thousands of years, usually without giving rise to popular movements. It’s only when exploitation, repression and/or discrimination reach a critical limit that people move. And the critical limit is reached when they look out-of-date, without reason because of changed circumstances, and/or the exploiter, repressor or discriminator seems weak and challengeable.

Reading
Charles Tilly, Durable inequality, University of California Press 1998
James C. Scott, The moral economy of the peasant, Yale University Press 1976