Thinking Social Movements in and from Latin America. A Critical View to Raul Zibechi's Contribution

Abstract

This article critically reconstructs Raúl Zibechi's view on social movements. First, it examines the conceptions of social movements and societies in movement. Next, it analyzes the categories of community and non–state powers. Third, it problematizes the notion of autonomy and its relation to emancipation. Finally, it analyzes Zibechi's interpretation of progressist governments. The categories of community, autonomy, non–state powers, and the questions they raise are key to thinking about emancipation and decolonization beyond the State. Nevertheless, the idealized vision of community, the reduction of the State to a hierarchical bureaucratic apparatus, and the inaccuracy of the concept of social movement set problems out to analyze their mutual relations, particularly in the context of Latin American progressist governments. Highlighting collective action that belongs to social movements, instead of identify them with their organizations, increases a complex understanding of them, and enhances the analysis of the infrastructures that make them possible, the unequal power relations within them and its several relations to the State, beyond the dichotomy between autonomy and cooptation.