Título en español.

Abstract

One of the most controversial points in contemporary sociology is the approach to the nature and perspectives of social movements and their relationship to politics. This essay attempts to introduce new approaches to this issue based on a broader definition of politics, and from there, discusses the alternative potentials of the social movements. A central conclusion of this work is that the current state of social movements is a moment of politicalcultural rearticulation of forces potentially alternative to the existing excluding and authoritarian orders. In this way, the social movements contribute by suggesting roads of a new way of making politics. But at the end the social movement cannot ignore the key postulate of politics: power. There are not unambiguous answers about up to where can this tendency constitute into spaces for an anticapitalist alternative and anyway the conformation to this alternative is even more incipient. It constitutes a challenge for the existing leftist parties and emphasizes the need to rethink their alternative on pluralist and democratic bases.