New social movements: new perspectives, new experiences, new challenges

Abstract

In the last years and specially in the first lustrum of the XXI century we have attended successive and disquieting events of very different nature, but interweaved, of enormous complexity and great impact, that demand urgent and equally complex answers. These events (natural catastrophes, great terrorist attacks, “preventive” global wars, etc.) that take place in a globalization context, more than any other thing, they are confirming a society based upon risk in which we are settling, making us all vulnerable beings. A society which rides on a world-wide model of an irremediably entropic nature, but increasingly unjust, unequal and unsustainable. The social movements, and particularly the antisystemical movements, considered as subjects of historical change, have before themselves multiple challenges in order to reorient and construct a new paradigm. In this text, in the light of intelligent answers (as opposed to desperate answers), of the new participative experiences, the emergency of an ethical subject, of new alliances that we intuitively see in, for example, the World Social Forums; we see the possible, probable, necessary convergence to assume the complexity of the collective action pursued. Four are the challenges we rescue in theory from the new social experiences and all of them deal with the quality of democracy, of a meditative democracy and thus a complex one: participative democracy, economical democracy based on social and solidary economy, environmental democracy founded on sustainability and cultural democracy as expressed in a sense of interculturality.