The Working Group on Anticapitalism and Emerging Sociabilities - ACySE, began its activities in 2010, in a regional context marked by the rise of so-called "post-neoliberal" (Sader, 2008), "populist" (Svampa, 2015), "progressive" (Modonessi, 2015), "socialist of the 21st century" (Chavez, 2005? Correa, 2010), or "neo-developmentalist" (Boito Jr, 2010? Feliz, López and García, 2016) governments within a transitional and experimental moment (Santos, 2007), a "civilizational crisis" (Borón, 2009), "savage politics" (Tapia, 2008), or a "crisis of the coloniality of power and knowledge" (Lander, 2003).

The initial debates were shaped by the unique context and the different names or characterizations that the Latin American and Caribbean situation received within the various theoretical and political positions of those of us who participated in the Working Group. As a result of the meetings and work carried out during the first period of the Working Group, two collective publications stand out, bearing witness to the exchanges that took place around the characterization of what we have called "anti-capitalist struggles" in the period 2010-2015. These struggles were problematized from two complementary analytical axes: the description of the experiences "from within" (a task that in each case involved a reflection on the existing political projects and practices "from below" and beyond the dominant institutions) and the analysis of the counter-hegemonic disputes that these experiences faced both against the modern/colonial capitalist world system, and against the State in its most heterogeneous conceptualizations (mainly from Marxist and anarchist perspectives) and conjunctural characterizations.

The relationship between the various anti-capitalist struggles and the dominant “progressive” institutions during the 2010-2015 period was central to our questions and analyses. In this regard, we shared research findings and developed a collective proposal aimed at describing how social struggles and emerging social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean took shape, their place within the main repertoires of action of the region's social movements, and the political advances they achieved in a context of relative permissiveness and the incorporation of social demands into the public policy agenda (Maneiro, 2018; 2019).

In recent years, since 2015, we have witnessed a drastic transformation of the international landscape, within a context of strong US intervention in Latin America, supported by the political rise of far-right groups in various Latin American governments (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Argentina). The capitalist structure, accentuated and based on unequal economic development, has placed the burden of social adjustment on the working class, increasing rates of precarious and informal employment. An extractive system that attacks community spaces and a resurgence of institutional violence, perpetrated by security forces and paramilitary groups, have exacerbated their virulence against a bleak backdrop of human rights.

In this sense, the Working Group focused, for the period 2016-2019, on interpreting and characterizing the reconfiguration of the Latin American and Caribbean political landscape, reconsidering the forms of resistance and anti-capitalist struggles of diverse collective subjects, taking into account the consequences and repercussions, in terms of continuities and changes with respect to the previous period, both in the relationship of social organizations with capital and in their relationship with the State. These various studies motivated the publication of a third book that addresses self-organizing movements and struggles for re-existence from processes of subjectivity interwoven with arts, communities, or feminisms, and emerging political identifications, in different spaces of Latin America and the insular Caribbean.

It is worth noting that the period from 2019 to 2022 was drastically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, as detailed in the first ACySE bulletin. Consequently, we had to adapt to the new circumstances, focusing many of our activities and efforts on understanding the pandemic's effects on our communities, particularly on the transformations of labor relations, the practices and actions of various social, labor, and political organizations, and observing the effects of quarantine on gender relations and the increase in institutional violence, the patterns of conflict, forms of social resistance, and the housing and living conditions of different vulnerable social sectors. The results were published in various working bulletins and in a forthcoming book, as well as in articles in scientific journals, at conferences and workshops, and in interventions in public debates and actions.

During this period, the Working Group also committed to new forms of intervention, fostering, through the Virtual Seminar Anticapitalisms and Emerging Sociabilities: Debates and Horizons of Possibilities (2020), a reflective approach by diverse students in different countries to the issue of social struggles with disruptive potential, as a commitment to critical/emancipatory education; the production of bulletins with an impact on the public agenda; dialogue with other Working Groups with discussions on the experiences of disputes in territories and social struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean, as in the forum Territories, struggles and r-existences: Community Horizons in the face of the reproduction of inequalities of capitalism in Latin America and the Caribbean (CLACSO Conference 2022), which included the participation of various community, social and political organizations; the emergence of study programs in various Universities and Institutes on Anticapitalisms and Emerging Sociabilities, with commitments to methodological work and axes of debate in conferences and courses; and supporting the struggles of social movements in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Cuba and Ecuador, with specific contacts and concrete approaches to processes of change.

In order to secure our fifth renewal, our proposal continues its mission to examine and critically analyze the meanings and challenges of certain Latin American and Caribbean organizational experiences that stand out for proposing the construction of alternative spaces in the face of current dynamics of accumulation, exploitation, discrimination, and domination, considering the new context of disputes in the region between the extreme right and progressive movements. We aim to promote a transdisciplinary, collective analytical perspective with contributions from sociology, political science, social and political history, anthropology, cultural studies, and other disciplines, in line with the challenges facing the social sciences in the region and the continental reality. On the one hand, it is about continuing the process of reflection, recording and accompanying experiences of social production and creation of knowledge and power with levels of autonomy and on the other hand, an exercise that, beyond the analysis of local and epochal scenarios, proposes to establish comparative frameworks between different political moments, considering that one of the variables to take into account is the degree of influence of macropolitical scenarios on the dynamics of the "emerging sociabilities" analyzed here.

The ACySE collective emerged a decade ago as a collaborative network of Latin American researchers and activists driven by a single epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and political question: what kinds of knowledge and experiences can arise from the dynamic intersection of academic research and social activism? Seeking answers to this complex, vast, and diverse problem, the team has worked on its latest book (2020) and on working bulletins 2, 3, and 4.

Modern social theory was largely constructed as an intellectual affirmation of the modern capitalist world; this is practically an uncontested assertion. However, this cognitive project also had its counterpart, expressed in a strong critical and reflective movement directed against capitalism, under the banner of socialism, whether in its anarchist or Marxist versions.

Within these versions, the anti-capitalist aspect of modern social theory manifested itself in the 19th century and throughout much of the 20th. The expression "anti-capitalism," initially delineated in the hegemonic Marxist language, is linked to specific processes of resistance to modernization and modernity, characterized by a historical, socially residual survival from the past. These are some of the initial ideas that explain the meaning given to the term "anti-capitalism" by dominant currents within Marxist thought until almost the end of the 20th century.

In the 1990s, the struggles and movements of alter-globalization allowed for the emergence of a new enunciative position for the term anti-capitalism, beyond its exclusive designation as a militant perspective, ideology, discourse, or political project, by considering it as a specific empirical reality. These developments were symptomatic of the metamorphoses experienced by capitalism in the second half of the 20th century. New dynamics of accumulation within a global movement of flexibilization and narrowing of economic circuits, combined with a reduction in the function and public services provided by the State, particularly due to a loss in the effectiveness of rights that seemed to be consolidated gains, all fragmented the very social construction of working-class identity as a driving force for collective action (Bell, 1991; Castel, 1998; Negri & Hardt, 2005).

Alongside the rise of this capitalism dominated by large financial and corporate conglomerates, the level of social interaction was reinforced by the "void" left by the dissolution of state-led socialist experiments and the bureaucratization of political parties and unions through their integration into the state, which is dominated by the messages of major brands and media oligopolies (Klein, 2001). This capitalism attempted, and continues to attempt, to instill in the social imagination the idea of ​​a world without antagonists (Boultanski & Chiapelo, 2002; Virno, 2008).

This is precisely the capitalism that clashed with and was confronted by the Zapatista uprising of 1994 and the alter-globalization rebellions that followed. This conceptual framework has served as a stage for understanding and further developing the complexities of both anti-capitalist struggles and emerging social structures within the reconfiguration of the Latin American and Caribbean political field. It has also allowed us to cultivate an analytically useful distinction, represented by two dimensions that can be situated within the concept of anti-capitalism: first, the discursive, normative, or ideological dimension, linked to political discourse and ideas that possess operative power and, by influencing the social imaginary, configure the field of possibility for political action; and second, the empirical dimension, understood as processes, social structures, relationships, or social organization, as can be seen in our latest book (2020).

This two-dimensionality of the concept of anti-capitalism points to two aspects that can be interconnected, although not necessarily. On the one hand, there is the existence of a discourse of resistance aimed at overcoming capitalist societies—the intention, on the part of certain social agents, to reform or break with the existing system and move towards other models of social order. On the other hand, there is the set of social processes or phenomena in the spheres of society, economy, politics, and culture that prefigure social relations that can be considered a threat to the current dynamics of accumulation, domination, and exploitation (López, 2015).

From the very content or expressions of these aforementioned representations and practices, we employ the concept of emergent sociabilities, but in a very particular way, to account for their more empirical than discursive elements. It is important to clarify here that relationships of cooperation, horizontality, mutual support, respect for differences, etc., do not signify anti-capitalism and are not emergent sociabilities. They can only be considered emergent sociabilities insofar as they stimulate, encourage, and promote certain interactive dispositions that, as a whole and in their articulation, empower subjects and dynamics of self-organization that materialize potential elements for constituting liberating sociohistorical configurations (Brancaleone, 2015). The most illustrative case is the Zapatista self-government experiment; not insignificant are the various forms of collective control and management of labor in some recovered factories and/or cooperatives in Argentina and Uruguay, the experiences of communal life in peripheral territories and slums, the rural settlements and recovered lands of peasants, indigenous people and quilombolas, youth collectives of cultural action in urban centers, the circuits of barter or exchanges that regenerate community fabrics, etc. (Zibechi, 2008).

Despite the transformations that have reconfigured societies and social actors in the last quarter of a century, capitalism continues to produce its antagonists. While it is still valid to consider classism as a relevant paradigm for organizing social struggles against capital, it is true that phenomena stemming from the fragmentation of the working class and the incorporation of many of its members into institutional spheres of power have opened up space for a new flourishing of movements that share aspects that we could call anti-systemic and anti-capitalist.

In this stage, it will be crucial to identify and characterize these renewed and emerging social structures in light of the transformations in the regional context. For the next work period (2022-2025), we intend to discuss the conceptual framework we have developed over the years as a Working Group, seeking to broaden the horizons of analysis with the categories and collective experiences that have emerged and been (re)configured as responses to the transformation of the Latin American and Caribbean political landscape (referring specifically to the Cuban case, which presents an additional challenge).

Based on the objectives set forth in this new project, we intend to address the following lines of research: Transdomination, democratization versus the advance of authoritarianism, and proto-fascist repertoires acquire new centrality in light of current political dynamics; Popular economy, situated between transdomination and anti-capitalism, where we propose to examine the experiences of cooperatives and worker-recuperated enterprises in the Southern Cone; Interculturalities, racisms, and feminisms, which show great potential for reflection, research, and learning; Utopia, nature, and justice, since utopian projects are ambivalent in the face of the capitalist regime. The purpose is to investigate, using the utopian method (Ávila, 2019), how capitalism and its regimes of nature subvert capitalism.