A Second Look at Latin American Social Movements: Globalizing Resistance to the Neoliberal Paradigm

It has been said here before, and accurately, that antisystemic struggles should not be circumscribed solely to what the orthodox call the infrastructure or base of capitalist social relations. The fact that we hold that the central nucleus of capitalist domination is in the ownership of the means of production does not mean that we ignore (in the double sense of being unaware of and not giving importance to) other spaces of domination. It is clear to us that transformations must not focus only on material conditions. Therefore for us there is no hierarchy of realms; we do not hold that the struggle for land has priority over gender struggles or that the latter are more important than recognition and respect for difference. We think, rather, that all emphases are necessary and that we should be humble and recognize that there is currently no organization or movement that could presume to cover all aspects of antisystemic, that is, anticapitalist, struggle. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]