In recent years, social movements in Latin America have faced a widespread context of renewed neoliberalism, in which the institutions of various states are crumbling, and with them, the most fundamental rights. In most countries of the region, processes of expropriation and dispossession have acquired renewed virulence and acceleration, enabled by legal reforms and sustained by the development of increasing forms of state violence, both political and exercised through security forces. These stark forms of dispossession are in line with a global context of neoliberal dominance, which generally combines with and requires the exacerbation of repressive actions and forms of criminalization of social movements and organizations that demand, in both the Global North and South, the protection or recovery of their territories, natural resources, and ways of life, social recognition, work, and, more generally, the right to a dignified life. The rightward shift in the region, which began to take shape in 2016 with the start of the work of the Working Group “Reinventions of the Commons,” has now strengthened significantly. Beyond the specificities of regional and national processes, a series of political, economic, social, and cultural changes with strong common features have deepened: a) the aforementioned increase in state violence; b) criticisms of the redistributive nature of the state and its role as a driver of the economy; c) the rollback of progressive trends that have been underway for at least two decades, including the loss of civil and social rights won in the various processes of redemocratization. Thus, for example, while constitutional advances in the recognition of cultural diversity—which also paved the way for the recognition of ethnic territories and traditional populations—are being overturned by conservative legal interpretations; At the same time, there is a regression in the political and social processing of the memory of state crimes, which are addressed in a precarious and timid manner, opening the possibility of nostalgic displays of past military regimes. One need only observe the ongoing processes of encroachment on indigenous lands in Brazil, the growing repression and criminalization of social protests in Argentina, the interventionist attempts by the United States in Venezuela, and the widespread trend toward increased use of the armed forces for internal security tasks affecting countries such as Mexico and Colombia. 

The neoliberal advance has been accompanied by processes of expropriation that have exacerbated inequality, leading to greater concentration of wealth in the hands of economic elites at the expense of impoverishing large sectors of the population. This neoliberal rationale produces a tendency toward the privatization and commodification of a variety of spheres and resources necessary for the reproduction of life, prioritizing corporate interests and expert logic over processes of deliberation, popular participation, and democratization. Thus, the dismantling of social rights has led to a reduction in spaces and forms of shared use and interaction (Fjeld and Quintana, 2019), stemming from a process in which lives not organized according to market values ​​are seen as “a potential risk” (Povinelli, 2011). Within this context, social movements, collectives, and organizations continue to resist and emerge across the continent, proposing—if not grand moments of insurrection—at least forms of experimentation that generate networks, intense emotional connections, desires for transformation, proposals for reorganization, localized small-scale economic production projects, and tentative grassroots institutions, among other forms of antagonism and interventions that make visible the forms of marginalization and subjugation, while simultaneously fostering potential forms of emancipation. These are fragile and precarious experiments in which—faced with expropriation and privatization as hallmarks of the neoliberal advance—the commons emerge as an unstable yet constantly reinvented space. In particular, these resistance movements in Latin America are built around the defense of territory as an affective space, a space of memory, and a site of collective productivity, which implies dependence on the material and immaterial, the human and non-human (plants, rivers, mountains, animals, and others) as agents with whom vital relationships are at stake. To achieve this, they reconfigure intimacy, the body, and daily life in order to unleash potential for consolidating projects that aim for the common good and curb the reach of capital. As Jaramillo (2018 and 2019) mentions, until recently, the prevailing approaches in the social sciences and humanities emphasized the impacts of capital and the problems of relationships, for example, between corporations and communities in Latin America and the Global South, neglecting the everyday intersections between the material, the temporal, and the affective when we refer, for example, to territories and the use and management of their resources. In this sense, encompassing these dimensions seems to open new theoretical and methodological paths and comparative potential across diverse regional contexts.

Thus, our purpose as a Working Group lies in addressing the unfolding of these new popular antagonisms, which challenge the power bloc while affirming and defending notions and practices of “the commons.” This involves a commitment to understanding and translating into research practices (inherently experimental and collaborative) the open, experimental, and inexhaustible nature of the practices that nourish the daily life of social movements, their creative character as a work of reconfiguration operating in heterogeneous social worlds. In this sense, we propose to illuminate the unfolding of a whole body of experimentation, of political creativity, that emerges from a micro-political level where the singular ways of being and acting of bodies in their relationship with themselves and with others are accentuated; up to a level of common political demands by antagonistic actors or collective subjects who demand the transformation of the social order and propose alternatives to it. Through collective reflection within the Working Group, we aim to contribute to understanding how diverse collectives, social movements, and grassroots organizations formulate and interpret the problems they identify as most urgent and pressing in each community and national context. We are interested in reflecting on how these definitions drive the creation of forms of self-organization that challenge, but also repurpose, complex mechanisms of political representation and state institutional channels. Thus, we seek to develop an understanding that fosters dialogue and strengthens movements and organizations, generating creative ways to understand and address the current problems that characterize the reality of Latin America today. We also emphasize that our working group is in tune with a broader agenda of development proposals for the Human and Social Sciences that is concerned with the democratization of knowledge in a broader sense, regarding social demands and human rights, building a global agenda through research, prevention and management of social transformations, which strengthens the relationship between knowledge, politics and practice to promote innovative thinking and theoretical tools with transformative potential, which also promote struggles against all forms of discrimination, the common good and forms of inclusion.

Our proposed analysis takes as its starting point the reflections and dialogues that the members of the Working Group “Reinventions of the Common” (2016-2019), from different disciplinary perspectives and academic traditions, have carried out in a series of meetings held in Bogotá, Florianópolis, and Buenos Aires. These discussions culminated in collective publications compiled in Issue 70 of the Journal of Social Studies. Moving away from traditional approaches to social movements—which, from a rational actor perspective, address the formation of collective subjects as responses to or emergent from structural processes and are based on a predefined teleological reading—we have explored the forms of political experimentation and ongoing processes of social creativity developed within the framework of collective organization dynamics and forms of social struggle, both rural and urban, which together have once again raised and defended the question of “the commons.” Thus, far from interpreting the failure of social movements and the triumph of new center-right regimes on the continent, our purpose was to address the emergence of new popular antagonisms that challenge the power bloc while affirming and defending notions and practices of the "commons." These antagonisms reveal how inequality and the constant privatization of the commons are not only (re)produced in political and economic institutions, in legal forms of organization, in the management of social affairs, and in the production and distribution of wealth, but also in the most everyday practices of bodies and their affects, in the subtle micropolitical economy of their forces. It is a matter of examining the potential of these struggles as inputs for expanding the boundaries of what is possible and conceivable in current circumstances and, of course, in the future.

In short, this exchange has allowed us to move forward on a series of agreements regarding the question of “the commons,” which inform the formulation of this proposal and form the basis of the work we intend to undertake in the coming period. Our perspective on the commons is framed within a growing reflection on “the most diverse modes of resistance to the subjugation of society, subjectivity, and life by capital” and constitutes a political principle (Laval and Dardot 2015: 155). Rather than referring to specific goods or resources—whether material or immaterial—the commons here refers to a relational logic and a set of practices for the sustainability of life (Caffentzis and Federici 2015; Gutiérrez Aguilar 2017). Thus, rather than thinking of the commons as something given, we start from a perspective that is interested in its production and focuses on the everyday practices and relationships that shape it. This production of the common includes rights, bodies, desires, affections and ways of life and not only activities of human beings but can also arise from destabilizations of the human that affirm the inseparable correlation between the human and the non-human (Quintana in press; Fernández Álvarez 2019; Rangel Loera, 2019). 

Thus, our approach to the commons is not limited to a particular logic or destination to be achieved—which would translate into a teleological reading from which our perspective distances itself—but rather explores the creative potential of ongoing political experimentation processes from a perspective that seeks to understand the commons as an inexhaustible process of experimentation (Fjeld and Quintana, 2019). This implies attending to the plurality of possible commons (as goods, spaces, practices, relationships, etc.) that are constituted as such in their praxis (Dardot and Laval, 2015). This has led some authors to propose shifting the term from a noun to the verb “commoning” (Harvey, 2013; Bollier and Helfrich, 2015). Talking about reinventions of the commons, then, aims to highlight the creative character that unfolds in this production (Dardot and Laval, 2015), but also how this process occurs as a work of (re)assembly and (re)configuration that operates in heterogeneous social worlds traversed by different logics and ways of understanding the world capable of counteracting the asymmetries, hierarchies, and inequalities inherent in the neoliberal logics that characterize capitalism today (Fjeld and Quintana, 2019). This demands a work of composition (Quintana, in press) that, far from being conceived as an exercise “among equals,” is grounded in the recognition of this unequal production. This implies, for example, analyzing how the processes of producing the commons coexist with forms of capitalist commodification, reproducing them while simultaneously appropriating them in a different way. In this direction, one of the main challenges lies in how to incorporate into our analysis those experiences that are presented to us a priori as less crystalline, more impure and contradictory insofar as they are traversed by market logics that produce and reproduce them.

Furthermore, the idea of ​​reinventing the commons as a process of political experimentation connects with a second issue we have explored in our collaborative work as part of the exchanges within this working group, concerning the institutional dimension. In this sense, our perspective is grounded in an idea of ​​institutionality that is necessarily open and unstable, and therefore connects with the persistence of the “non-common” (Blaser and de la Cadena, 2017), which includes the possibility of addressing disagreement regarding what is established as such.

Finally, our perspective begins by recognizing that, within these processes of mobilization and collective struggle, not only are alternative forms of knowledge produced, but also politically and theoretically productive knowledge. Therefore, we distance ourselves from an extractivist model of knowledge production that takes these movements and collectives as its “object” of study, while simultaneously acknowledging that our production is not neutral but rather intervenes in a complex and conflictive field of historical forces. Thus, the exercise of thinking “with” rather than “about” the practices and discourses of these movements and collectives contributes in a specific way to the diagnosis, interpretation, and treatment of social problems and, for this reason, can also be considered, in a certain sense, “political.” We then return to those approaches to social movements that start from and embrace the particularity of their historical experiences in the Latin American context, such as those of “popular education” or “participatory action research” (among others, Fals Borda, Freire, Múnera) as well as those perspectives that have proposed to understand social movements as producers of situated knowledge and understanding.

From this perspective, our proposal is organized around 4 interconnected dimensions from which to explore this production of the common, building a comparative map based on the studies developed by the members of the Working Group: 

1) dimension of everyday experience that attends to the practices and relationships that shape the common in relation to the defense and production of ways of life, affects, bodies and territories.

2) dimension related to historically and socially situated dynamics that allows us to understand local and regional specificities as well as common logics. 

3) dimension linked to the processes of institutionalization from a conflictive, unstable and open perspective that considers the dynamics of the relationship with "the uncommon".

4) epistemological dimension relating to the production of knowledge and the knowledge practices of movements and organizations.