Prefigurative politics of Latin America popular movements. Towards a new matrix of intellection for the social sciences

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to recover the notion of prefigurative politics as a potential “measuring unit” which allows for the analysis of the put forward by the Latin-American social movements, with the purpose of confronting it with some of the concrete experiences that exist in Latin America. After defining prefigurative politics as a set of practices and social relations that, in the present moment, “anticipate” the germs of a future society, it is fundamented why this category might constitute a pertinent notion to approach this new processes, in which social movements emerge as a weighty collective actor by installing in the public agenda certain claims and demands, and influencing state institutions, but without their integration or subsumption to their government structures.