Urban movements and self-management. Farewell to political parties?

Abstract

During the early 1980s Latin America social organizations came out strongly in inner-city politics and became very active within their communities by setting up mechanisms not only to address but also to solve their problems. These movements represent a new form to partake collectively and to take action against old institutional forms of representation: and they basically question political parties for having no institutional legitimacy. Such programs coming out of neoliberalism, clearly have affected social groups, and adversely so, and they have led to subsequent reactions, particularly in the industrial areas. In this article, the author shows Argentina's urban movements as paradigmatic cases of the new social phenomenon going on, and it also depicts the political party's lacking institutional legitimacy to represent people's needs and interests.