Overlapping Crises and Social Movement Responses: Is the European Environmental Movement Growing More Anti-Capitalist?

The intersection of the crises of capitalism, the climate, and loss of biodiversity are pressuring social movements that are primarily focused on environmental issues to increasingly concern themselves with the economy. The financial crisis which started in 2008, the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the current cost-of-living crisis exacerbated by the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, each function as political opportunities to reshape the way climate movement organisations think about and frame their diagnosis and prognosis climate change. In particular, this paper seeks to understand to what extent anti-capitalist frames have increased as the crises have temporally overlapped. Additionally, a segment of the framing literature points to framing competition between organizations within the same movement, which suggests that if one organization were to adopt an anti-capitalist position, others may avoid it. The paper uses a framing analysis of public communication across prominent climate movement organizations to see if the use of the economy as a diagnostic or prognostic frame has changed over time to a more radical anti-capitalist position and to see how other organizations respond to such changes. Specifically, the paper focuses on the European branches of Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace. It finds that anti-capitalist frames have increased since the COVID19 pandemic, although the frame remains marginal. The qualitative analysis found few connections between the idea of overlapping crises and anti-capitalist frames within the movement texts themselves but has pointed to the importance of transnational spillover.