Social movements are, according to Sidney Tarrow, "collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities." .
Character of New Social Movements .
1. Most New Social Movements anchor the ideological conceptions to the assumption that civil society is getting diminished. Under the combined impact of the forces of the state and market, society grows helpless. Consequently, the New Social Movements raise the issue of self-defense of the community and society against the increasing expansion of the state apparatuses. Central to these struggles is for a post bourgeois, post-patriarchal, and democratic civil society. One needs to recognize that New Social Movements are not for anarchy; they instead call for a just and dignified condition for the conception, birth, maturation and reproduction of a creative human being in tune with nature.
2. The New Social Movements radically alter the Marxist paradigm of explaining conflicts and contradictions in terms of 'class' and class conflict. Marxism saw all forms of struggles as class struggles and all forms of human groupings as class groupings. The site of social conflict in the Marxist mode used to be seen as located in the class structure of societies. Social conflicts now spill over a space wider than the social space of the classes, extending beyond the confines of a specific society or political system. The New Social Movements are transnational movements. These movements articulate, project and struggle for human existence, possibly for a sensible existence in the future. They seek to answer questions relating to peace, disarmament, nuclear pollution; relating to the concerns of the planet, ecology, environment and human rights. Their concerns go beyond the class paradigm and overcome the inability of Marxist materialistic explanations to answer these new contemporary stirrings.