Inside and outside the State Reflections on Brazilian social movements and political participation

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the entry of social movements into the State through participatory institutions has transformed political participation in Brazil. The academic focus has expanded beyond voting and has generated analyses of repertoires of movement-State interaction, without leaving protests behind. However, other forms of collective action not linked to socio-State interaction have remained off the radar. In this essay, we begin by dividing institutionalist and autonomist perspectives to also capture collective experiences beyond, against, and in spite of the State. To this end, we draw on some empirical cases and explore a Latin American literature written in Spanish that helps us shed light on these experiences. The proposal aims to enrich the understanding of forms of political participation in Brazil and inspire new public policy instruments to address structural inequalities, as well as encourage non-State forms of social organization.

Keywords:
Political Participation; Social Movements; Autonomy; Brazil; Latin America.

Resumo

Nas últimas três décadas, a entrada dos movimentos sociais no Estado através das instituições participativas transformou a participação política no Brasil. O foco acadêmico se ampliou para além do voto e engendrou análises sobre repertórios de interação movimentos-Estado, sem deixar atrás os protestos. No entanto, outras formas de ação coletiva não vinculadas à interação socioestatal ficaram de fora do radar. Neste ensaio, partimos da divisão entre as perspectivas institucionalista e autonomista para capturar também experiências coletivas para além, contra e apesar do Estado. Para tanto, recorremos a alguns casos empíricos e exploramos uma literatura latino-americana escrita em espanhol que nos ajuda a iluminar as mencionadas experiências. A proposta visa enriquecer a compreensão das formas de participação política no Brasil e inspirar novos instrumentos de políticas públicas para enfrentar desigualdades estruturais, assim como encorajar formas não estatais de organização social.

Palavras-chave:
Participação Política; Movimentos Sociais; Autonomia; Brasil; América Latina.

Introduction

The last three decades have been seen as those that have reinvented the dynamics of Brazilian political participation. Studies on this form of political advocacy have been expanded academically with activities beyond voting, embracing participatory institutions (PIs) such as councils, conferences, participatory budgeting, and public hearings, among others (Gurza Lavalle; Barone, 2015). They have also incorporated the repertoires of interaction employed by social movements that occurred through state institutions, as well as extra-institutional actions such as protests. The collective struggles and mobilizations for the implementation of the rights established in the 1988 Federal Constitution (CF88) led researchers to focus on political participation in the relationship between movements and the State, creating a robust and original set of concepts, approaches, and explanations, but leaving other forms of social movement action outside of this analytical radar. These other forms - actions involving individual and collective actors in the making and decision-making of ways of reproducing life outside of direct interaction with the State - have been analyzed by other academic fields.

Thus, at the risk of over-reducing the topic’s complexity, one could say that academic literature on Brazilian social movements has been divided between autonomists¹ and institutionalists. The former emphasizes the more or less independent ways in which collective actors organize and demarcate their rejection of institutionalized channels. In contrast, the second argues that state actors and institutions are built and transformed through mutual constitution, and in this sense, autonomy is merely a political postulate (Gurza Lavalle; Szwako, 2015) or a type of action (Oliveira; Dowbor, 2020). The coexistence between these two fields generally involves little exchange or shared reflection. Institutionalists are seen as state-centric and, at best, reformist, and in this sense, uncritical of the status quo. Autonomists, in turn, are seen as collectors of rare and ephemeral treasures of forms of collective struggle and organization.

The separation or specialization of fields of study is not a problem in itself. However, when we think about the future of participation, collective experiences outside the state or despite it can broaden our vision of the possibilities and forms of inclusion and political participation. This diversity of forms and contingencies that lead people and social actors to organize themselves differently to transform their worldviews into concrete actions and practices, including public policies, but not limited to them, can be sources of inspiration for gaining new angles of analysis and understanding why and how people and actors engage in collective actions in concrete formats. In this sense, we do not wish to address here the practical meanings of participation, which have already been masterfully done by Adrián Gurza Lavalle and Ernesto Isunza (2022). We present here a proposal for the conceptual expansion of political participation beyond the State, following Latin American literature, mainly in Spanish, in order to offer the possibility of expanding the future horizons of participation.

By focusing on these instances and bringing Latin American literature written in Spanish, we seek to build bridges and draw attention to those bodies that, by being constituted outside the State, show and denounce their limits and, at the same time, reveal experiences that can feed the imagination for the construction of new public policy instruments or the transformation of experiences into policies and new formats of participation (Dowbor; Carlos; Albuquerque, 2018; Tatagiba; Teixeira, 2021). Because of this focus, we will concentrate on those experiences guided by democratic propositions. This option does not deny the existence of highly hierarchical or even uncivil collective action (Balestrin, 2015) and is justified by the search for inspiration from the aforementioned horizons. Notably, the transformation of societal experience into some element of public policy may result in changes and the acquisition of characteristics distinct from the initial project. However, due to the resources and reach of the state apparatus, it has the potential for broad implementation and, thus, can influence the profound inequalities that characterize the country.

Thus, the purposefully watertight distinction between the two fields serves as a basis for developing a reflection here in the form of an essay, combined with a non-systematic literature review², highlighting how studies on political participation, previously restricted to voting, have expanded to include a variety of forms and channels. Despite these advances, however, some forms of collective action have remained outside the focus of these state-centric analyses. This second and central aspect of the text will be explored through the analysis of political activities of collective actors beyond, against, and in spite of the State.

We also reflect on and highlight a kind of missing (or forgotten, or hidden) link in discussions about Brazilian social movements: the economic dimension of life, that is, that which encompasses the dynamics of material reproduction, the management of material needs, and labor. We consider it fruitful to include this discussion in these lines because, on the one hand, the same hyperfocus on institutional actions that relegated autonomist actions to the background is what produced this certain disinterest in the economic dimension of life; and, on the other hand, because the aforementioned studies written in Spanish that emphasize the autonomist character of social movements also highlight actions that analyze this economic dimension of life.

The reader will first find a brief theoretical reflection that will allow us to view all these experiences from two common perspectives. Institutionalized and autonomist experiences undergo institutionalization processes. This premise allows us to consider permanence even when dealing with so-called informal experiences, which means the reproduction of forms, their stabilization, and appropriation. The second perspective concerns the definition of political action, which we propose to extend beyond state institutions together with a number of authors.

The text proposed here, based on the authors’ experience and academic trajectory, stems from the perceived lack of dialogue between the two fields of study mentioned above. The difference between the state-centric emphasis in Brazilian literature and the vision of autonomous forms, despite, against, and beyond the state, found in several important Latin American texts has been stylized by us to spark future debate.

By way of an analytical entry, part 1

A first analytical problem that we consider important to shed light on has to do with the fact that the experiences described as autonomous, on the one hand, and the institutionalized ones, on the other, share their instituted character as constituted as rules, norms, or practices, institutionalized within the State or permanent in the societal sphere. In this sense, the established does not mean formalization within the State, that is, recognition by the State, but rather its permanence over time and its existence. This continuation over time is most evident in the case of participatory institutions, such as councils, for example, regarding which organizational mortality is not even mentioned, even though they are always subject to dismantling. However, it is also typical of autonomist experiences, although the likelihood of their extinction is affirmed.

The institution and the instituting entity can be seen (and have been so) as antagonistic, with the instituted entity representing repression, co-optation, and mechanical reproduction, and the instituting entity representing rebellion and subversion. An apologetic view would simplify this dyad, attributing stability to the instituted entity and novelty and autonomy to the instituting entity. However, as René Lourau (2004) has stated, we find the institutional dimension at all levels of analysis: at the individual, at the organizational (school or union, for example), and the formal or informal group levels.

Thus, it follows that those considered to be instituting entities are also affected by institutionalization processes. Thus, by resisting antagonistic classification, one can reclaim the instituting power within institutions and, thus, the reasons for their contestation or criticism. Also, one can analyze the ongoing processes of institutionalization within the instituting entity without threatening its legitimacy. What persists over time highlights what makes sense to the actors, as they continue to be part of specific experiences that, despite not being formalized through statutes, are institutionalized. Analyzing this process as a spiral between the instituting and the instituted, engendered by the institutionalization processes, avoids “institutional blindness” (Lourau, 2004), which analyzes institutions without recapturing their founding act. In the case of Brazilian PIs, we should recall that their founding act carried the postulate of including civil society in political decision-making processes and, even, of transforming the State rather than accommodating within it.

By highlighting only their institutionalized nature, there is a risk of contributing to the dismantling of institutions that gather those who would otherwise hardly access and influence decision-making processes (Schlozman; Verba; Brady, 2012). Institutionalization permeates what, given the practice’s materialization location - that is, outside the state - would be called instituting. By paying attention to what endures, the analyst meets with societal experiences that resonate with people and can understand why they do so. Several diverse forms emerge, feeding the social analyst’s imagination with other possibilities for collective decision-making at different stages of community life.

By way of an analytical entry, part 2

Another analytical issue we consider appropriate to shed light on concerns what is meant when we speak of political action or, in terms more familiar to social movement studies, when we speak of collective action from the perspective of political advocacy. Here, we once again perceive the need for some explanation to bridge what, at first, seem to be very different dynamics when we analyze autonomous actions, on the one hand, and institutional actions, on the other.

In Brazil, especially after the establishment of the New State in 1937, the strong presence of an entire state apparatus, such as the set of state institutions responsible for managing public affairs, contributed to the construction of a particular narrative that considers politics and the State almost as synonymous. After Brazil’s last dictatorship, the drafting and enactment of the 1988 Constitution and the subsequent gradual inclusion of civil society organizations and social movements in the state structure deepened the perception of politics and the State as “equal things”. The rise of the Workers’ Party (PT) in Brasília in 2003 was the icing on the cake of this process, a moment in which the same actors could simultaneously act as a social movement activist, a PT member, and a state employee (Silva; Oliveira, 2011).

What is most striking, however, is the interpretative controversy that the process briefly described above produced. In other words, the inclusion of civil society organizations and, specifically, social movements within the State produced some disinterest in all political processes that resisted the State’s influence. Everything related to the State came to be seen as public-political, while everything else remained outside it: culture, economics, philosophy, utopia - everything but politics.

What we want to defend here is, on the other hand, that politics is not - and cannot be - a monopoly of State institutions; and that, therefore, it should be the task of social movement scholars also to understand the political processes that develop around it:

Politics does not refer to the activity of rulers and leaders, nor to activities that unfold exclusively within the realm of the State. Politics is that dimension of human activity and relationality related to living together and the organization of life in common. Inherent in the human life social reproduction process, politics is a practical activity that constructs, through confrontation and agreement, the relational space of human beings as citizens: as co-participants in a normative ordering of their coexistence. (Roux, 2002, p. 248).

In light of the above, we do not intend to defend the aforementioned idea of political action as something that should replace state-centered politics and its surroundings, thus assuming a dispute over monopolies. Instead, we intend to substantiate the idea that politics as an everyday action/doing spreads, more or less organically, across all spheres of sociability, thus escaping the State’s monopoly, in what Luis Tapia (2008) called wild politics.

The processes of institutionalization and the vision of political action beyond the State help us consider the activation, permanence, and mobilization of social movements’ forms of action despite, against, or beyond the State. By considering them as institutionalized and political, we can incorporate into our analyses spaces where rights, care practices, and the material reproduction of life are produced. Lest anyone think we are extolling this societal aspect, similar to Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato (1999), we underscore that we intend to focus here on the efforts of social actors in producing practices despite, against, and beyond the State - that is, where the State is silent, neglectful, denied, and rejected, but which challenge themselves to engender democratic innovations. In this sense, we do not claim that these actions are produced regardless of the State. Quite the contrary, they are intertwined in the process of mutual constitution with it. They can help us understand the structural limits of the Brazilian State, its institutional racism and violence, for example.

Studies of Brazilian social movements: Analyses of protests and within the State

Building on advances in American social movement theory, 21st-century Brazilian literature, based on several empirical studies, has engendered an analytical shift from a confrontational repertoire focused on extra-institutional politics to a repertoire of interaction, in which actions via state institutions have gained prominence. This analytical-theoretical process resulted from several studies that began with specific social movements, in which researchers followed collective actors within State institutions. In common with protest actions, these forms of action had public visibility and dispute with and for the State, which could be observed when an activist assumed a commissioned position, the movement contested a seat on a management board, scheduled meetings with political representatives, or even contacted the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

In this sense, researchers analytically focused on understanding socio-state interactions, followed the movements and their agendas, and thus, their research explored institutional spaces and pathways. If the movements were state-centric, we too became the same, refining our analytical apparatus to understand the forms, incidence, and effects on public policies. A set of important concepts and approaches has been coined and was widely used by new generations: interaction repertoire (Abers; Tatagiba; Serafim, 2014), institutional activism (Abers, 2021), associative programs (Tatagiba; Teixeira, 2021), and agency domain approach (Gurza Lavalle; Carlos; Dowbor; Szwako, 2019).

One consequence of these advances was that the political participation concept was broadened beyond voting (Arretche, 2015). In this expansion, PIs were an empirical chapter and a special field of study, to the point that popular, and later citizen or social, participation was restricted to “participation in participatory institutions” (Gurza Lavalle; Isunza, 2022, quotation marks in the original). In an original institutional architecture (Isunza; Gurza Lavalle, 2024), councils, conferences, public hearings, and participatory budgets were expanded throughout the country, at the three federative levels and in many public policy sectors, with a greater or lesser degree of influence, producing decisions (Gurza Lavalle; Voigt; Serafim, 2016) and playing a variety of roles in producing public policies (Almeida; Martelli; Coelho, 2021). As we saw above, from the viewpoint of movements, PIs are one of the possible channels of action, and what was evident in the resistance and resilience against the attempted dismantling by Jair Bolsonaro is undoubtedly relevant (Bezerra et al., 2024).

Thus, from a theoretical perspective, participation studies have diversified, become more complex, and pointed to analytical inflections, always, however, revolving around these institutionalized instances of participation or through institutionalized channels. Whether by following social movements that chose to contest the State or by expanding the analytical dimensions capable of understanding PIs, these studies of Brazilian social movements overlooked several actions and forms of movement activity, as well as parts of the State impervious to progressive movements. On the one hand, this limited the understanding of the boundaries of actions via the State; that is, where the movements were unable to access because they found already consolidated domains of agency and, on the other, the actions, said to be autonomous or not, in which the movement actors materialized their visions of the world despite, against, or beyond the State.

What was left out, part 1: isolation, technicality, and state omission as an impediment to institutional participation or participation via institutions

There is a range of economic issues that remain isolated, as they have been for decades, from broader civil society participation. Social actors have developed a few of the necessary frameworks for challenging them within the State, while these economic agendas were and are dominated by economic interests and appropriated by communities of technicians and experts endowed with a hermetic jargon. Public policies related to economic development are those that least rely on institutional forms of participation (Pires; Vaz, 2014), accounting for no more than 20% of national collegiate bodies (Bezerra et al., 2024), and in these, the presence of civil society focused on redistributive agendas is almost non-existent (Dagnino, 2016). A specific example is the country’s tax issue, which is highly regressive. It highlights the paradoxical tension of the 1988 Constitution, which expanded social rights but failed to do the same with revenue collection. Seen marginally on the agendas of movements and lacking a common framework, the issues of taxation of large fortunes, exemptions for profits and dividends, tax exemption drains, and tax evasion are terms of an unfair social contract that participatory institutions have not yet addressed.

Other parts of the State may also be closed to the participation of movements when it comes to implementing social policies they advocate. The hermetic status quo, a term coined by Victoria Braga (2024), refers to this type of situation. The author shows how gigantic social problems, such as the homicide of young Black people, highlighted by the Black movement, receive attention on the government’s agenda, but face difficulties in advancing implementation, as they depend on the coordination of support from sectors resistant to this agenda.

Another type of impediment to social participation is when the state chooses to prohibit certain activities and fails to provide inclusive regulation. The functioning of the medical cannabis network highlights the limits of action within the state and its institutions by actors with alternative views (Laver, 2024). The effectiveness of cannabis use in treating chronic diseases, proven by the experiences of families, led to the formation of a network of people, including mothers, doctors, and lawyers, who collectively developed several activities that enabled the use of cannabis oil in a process independent of much of the government. This autonomy emerged due to the government’s failure to regulate domestic production and its reproduction of prohibitionism regarding the recreational use of marijuana.

Here, we discuss an action undertaken in spite of the State, which already hints at what we will explore in the next section. Political action and productive activities are intertwined: the actors recognize the shared difficulty (high prices of imported CBD oil), see the solution in local and homemade production, and choose to develop productive and care activities together: “a public welfare service provided in spite of the State” (Laver, 2024).

Thus, Camila Laver (2024) shows how, in the vacuums left by the State’s retraction or deliberate inaction, autonomous forms of problem-solving are created through the action of social movements and associative networks, yet they aim to solve social problems. This case highlights the action that grows and consolidates despite the State, a process in which people organize and make decisions through rules and organizations they build. This is a network of resourceful actors, composed of the middle class, which partly explains its success. However, the analytical point here is to highlight the articulation among actors, their ability to organize and decide in order to produce actions that solve concrete problems, and where previously established or regulated state action impeded this resolution. The aim here is to highlight how actors promote their actions despite the State and what we can learn from observing these moments of collective action, which include decision-making processes to solve everyday problems. This issue has been addressed by scholars of social movements in other parts of Latin America, which we will discuss below.

What was left out, part 2: The autonomies despite, against, and beyond the State

The popular nature of the Workers’ Party governments at the beginning of the century, and the historical proximity of their leaders to social movements, produced some normativity for institutionalized actions, given the opportunities available; that is, they projected some centrality to the State within the varied repertoire of action available to each party. However:

There is a belief that the more visible a movement is, the more embedded it is in “reality” and part of the political agenda, the more effective its actions will be because they will reach broad sectors. However, this makes them [more or less] dependent on the system’s (space-time) agenda. (Zibechi, 2007, p. 52).

Raúl Zibechi invites us to shift to the opposite pole to which we were gravitating - that is, to the pole of actions that discard or, at the very least, relegate the relationship with the State to a secondary position in their tactics, prioritizing actions such as self-organization and self-management. These movements are generally characterized by their discourse and actions tied to the grammar of autonomy, and have been interpreted academically in different ways over the past 30 years (Oliveira; Modonesi, 2024).

For our part, in a previous interpretative effort, we had already realized that when movements choose not to interact with the State, they “(i) deny the State in its entirety and construct ways of life on its margins; (ii) deny the ways in which the State functions and construct alternative organizational forms and extra-institutional political confrontation […]” (Oliveira; Dowbor, 2020, p. 3); here we will focus on the first type, since protest analyses more or less captured the empirical experiences most linked to the second.

If some movements deny either fractions or the entirety of the State, what comes next - that is, the moment of action as a positive construction - can be pretty diverse. These are varied experiences, including the recovery and regeneration of territories, emphasizing counter-hegemonic forms of relating to the natural environment; the development of political agendas and projects not subordinate to the State, parties, unions, and churches; the affirmation of popular identities and those considered dissident beyond state rules; the creation of autonomous educational systems and the training of their intellectuals; the subversion of patriarchal gender relations and the affirmation of women as leaders in emancipatory processes; the construction of other ways of perceiving and organizing work beyond the social relations of capitalist production (Zibechi, 2003).

The actions of social movements such as self-organization and self-management, which we understand as more or less typical of an important part of Latin American social movements, emphasizing Indigenous, quilombola, and peasant movements, but also urban movements linked to the struggle for housing (Moraes, 2020), gain an everyday character when they “detach” themselves from both the State and the dynamics of capital.

It is precisely this everyday nature of these actions that leads us to a connection between the ideas we have just outlined and the authors who emphasize a kind of “updated return to previously fractured social flows”, and there are at least five hundred years of fractures and concealments, since 1492, with the beginning of the colonial process. An “updated return” because there is no sort of traditionalism or cult of the past (Quijano, 2014; Segato, 2012) and which, on the contrary, can therefore be thought of through several contemporary lenses: that of community frameworks, by Raquel Gutiérrez (2015), the social flow of rebellion, by Sergio Tischler (2011), the power-to-do, by John Holloway (2002), emerging sociabilities, by Colectivo ACySE (2012), the non-capitalist reproduction of life, by Eduardo Aguilar (2020), or even the popular-community self-government (Oliveira, 2022a).

Whatever the aforementioned lenses, communally reproducing life, to follow Gutiérrez, means reproducing it from references other than those of the capitalist-colonial world-system, within which nation-states, authoritarian forms of government, and even current democracies operate. This old-new social flow, which points to the communal reproduction of life, is a type of flow of everyday social relations, of strong socio-spatial bonds (Souza, 2017), which reconnects the dimensions of life separated by the advance of the colonial process in Latin America. A type of social flow that, therefore, reconnects politics, economy, and culture in the totality of the organization of communal life.

In countless experiences located in spaces and times marginalized by the State-form and the dynamics of capital - among which we can highlight Mexican cases such as the autonomous Zapatista communities in Chiapas and the Indigenous municipality of Cherán, among others, as well as distinct Indigenous communities in Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, and Brazil, where it is still important to mention the quilombola communities; besides diverse urban experiences, most of them linked to the struggle for housing throughout Latin America - the separation between economics and politics loses meaning. On the other hand, in the daily life of these experiences, economy and politics intertwine in a substantive process; they are all one thing. We could then consider the actions of some social movements from the perspective of self-organization of everyday affairs - as a political dimension of life - and self-management of material resources and labor - as an economic dimension of life - as dimensions connected by the daily challenges of affirming and reproducing community life.

What was left out, part 3: The economic dimension as the material reproduction of life

The novel argument we want to present in this section is that there is a diversity of experiences considered, a priori, economic. However, they are ultimately also political - that is, they are political-economic and linked to the material reproduction of life. We should note, however, that because they are considered more economic than political, or even purely economic, these experiences have received little analysis in Brazilian social movement literature over the past 30 years.

These experiences are linked to the material reproduction of life. In general, they do not interact directly with the State. They could, therefore, be read from the idea of latency developed by Alberto Melucci (1989). In other words, Melucci affirms that, when there is no relationship with the State, these processes are linked to the cultural field of life. In contrast, they are political processes when there is a relationship with the State.

In a previous work (Oliveira; Ferrarini; Dowbor, 2023), we argued that if what characterizes an act as political act are processes of deliberation and decision-making about collective coexistence, then experiences seen as exclusively economic - or cultural - are ultimately also political experiences, since regardless of the dimension under analysis - political, economic, cultural, and spiritual - there is no collective life without some form of deliberation and decision-making.

It seems pretty clear to us that this separation between what is in the field of politics and what is in the field of economics meant that, for example, studies linked to work and trade unionism, therefore studies considered economic, were the responsibility of Marxists and the sociology of work. In this sense, we should mention that few academic analyses related to social movement studies (Brancaleone, 2019; Brancaleone; Mello, 2017; Ferrarini; Gaiger; Schiochet, 2018; França Filho, 2007; Oliveira, 2022a, 2022b, 2024; Oliveira; Ferrarini; Dowbor, 2023; Santos, 2010) have focused on interpreting specific economic experiences; that is, those linked to the material reproduction of life - which can also be read as linked to the management of material needs and work - from the lens of collective action and social movements.

Why haven’t the daily lives of informal collective-associated work groups, as well as solidarity-based marketing and consumption groups, generated significant interest in studies of social movements? Why have experiences like that of the Teia dos Povos, strongly linked to the ideas of labor and territory, only recently become of interest to such studies? Why did only the facets that interacted with the State of movements, such as the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, the National Movement of Recyclable Material Collectors, and the Brazilian Solidarity Economy Movement, generate interest in such studies? Our hypothetical answer is, once again, that the hyperfocus on political processes linked to the State caused this kind of blind spot, thus failing to see more or less disruptive some practices that could - and still can - enrich our vision of ways of doing things collectively, that is, of participating, and that feed with meaning and will the people and communities engaged in the transformation of their surroundings.

Final reflexions

Beyond voting, Brazil has a broad and robust institutionalized architecture for political participation, comprised of councils and conferences, among others, in which civil society shares spaces for consultation and/or deliberation with other state and market actors. Furthermore, several social movements compete for public policies, also using other institutionalized channels of access and advocacy through the three branches of government.

While this broad action via the State conceptually expanded the meaning of participation, analyses were restricted to socio-state interactions, in which the “backstage of the political struggle” (Moraes, 2018) or, in other words, the movements’ latent periods, as well as some collective action sectors, remained off the analytical radar. Given the centrality accorded by experts to institutional forms of participation, a significant portion of the political work of Brazilian social movements remained invisible. By taking the movements’ interaction with the state as a privileged reference, these analyses overlooked experiences that escape state logic.

However, we understand that the political work of movements cannot be reduced to their insertion into the institutional spaces of the State. On the contrary, the struggle for autonomy - whether despite, against, or beyond the State - reveals essential dynamics that range from everyday resistance to the construction of emancipatory alternatives that reconfigure the very foundations of social organization and forms of political participation, dynamics captured by Latin American literature, written primarily in Spanish, which is why, in this reflection, we proposed to bring this variety of experiences to bear on where it is relevant to emphasize participation based on its existing framework. These experiences, when viewed through the prism of their persistence over time and political practice, can offer new or different formats of participation, which implies recognizing, among other things, the centrality of the economic dimension as a fundamental part of the material reproduction of life.

Our focus on democratic experiences, whether within or outside the state, is not because we believe that only these are important for social analysis, but because they feed our democratic imagination in terms of forms of participation in the current context. On the other hand, only by overcoming the restrictive view of political action that links it exclusively to the state will it be possible to understand, in all its complexity, how social movements challenge, dispute, and reinvent structures of power and domination, often operating outside the State’s field of visibility.

• 1
  In this text, we use the distinction between autonomists and institutionalists strictly to refer to fields and/or research interests within the broader field of social movement and political participation studies in Brazil. This explanation is vital to avoid misinterpretations regarding the definition of the actions of the movements studied, either by those interested in the autonomist field or those interested in the institutionalist field.
• 2
  The field of studies on collective action, and more specifically, on social movements and political participation, is vast and rich, and this text does not intend to conduct an exhaustive review of this literature. As part of the research community that we call state-centric, and regular readers of this field, we draw on this knowledge to build our arguments and establish dialogue with a broader audience beyond experts.

Data Availability Statement

The research data are available within the main text of the article.

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• Editors:
  Carinne Magnago, Aurea Ianni

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  10 Nov 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  23 May 2025
• Accepted
  28 May 2025