Potential conflict categories can become movements only when they develop conscious collective identities

The participants in a movement have to see themselves as a category, a ”we”, posed against a ”they” with at least a partially contrary identity. Such identities work as a defence against the hegemonic worldview of the opposite party, and is constructed under experiences of conflicts with categories of opposite identities. Those conflicts initially express themselves as everyday resistance, that is, what one does to keep exploitation, repression and discrimination endurable.

Identities are strengthened by common martyrs, heroes, symbols, actions and rites, and by a common habitus and mutual solidarity. Such means are consciously used by many social movements to strengthen their base’s collective identity. But they are also invented spontaneously by the participants, because it strengthen them as persons to belong to a collective with a strong identity.

But given all this, reasonable identity building is difficult. Conflicts may arise about several possible identities. They can be constructed about objective conditions of life – being crystallized about classes, elites/non-elites, and in- and out-groups – but they can also be built about habitus, lifestyle and even ideologies. Identities may be built around all these simultaneously and create a somewhat chaotic situation. With whom should for example a black American Muslim female worker identify and look for solidarity?

Peoples’ movements have often had problems with conflicts between different possible identitities, and tried to solve them with declaring all conflicts they are not thematizing themselves as irrelevant – cherry-picking, if the expression is permitted. But this is rarely effective, because it tends to raise walls between people who might otherwise support eachother. The Ecuadorian Native movement<LÄNK> has tried another way – declaring all as Natives if they don’t belong to the Creole upper class. The important is that the ”we” is as encompassing it can be without causing insurmountable internal quarrels.