The Working Group on Anticapitalism and Emerging Sociabilities (ACySE) was founded in 2010 in a Latin American context marked by the expansion of self-proclaimed progressive governments (Machado and Zibechi, 2017). For over a decade, the Working Group supported policies that expanded and deepened rights and cycles of social mobilization across the region, focusing on the emergence of community-based initiatives and territorial autonomies, while also addressing the tensions generated by these progressive governments and their neo-developmentalist and neo-extractivist economic policies. However, the regional framework guiding the analysis for the 2026–2028 period presents qualitatively different challenges than those of that time.

Following the successive waves of neoliberal restorations and authoritarian rightward shifts—accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the accelerated digitization of social life—Latin America and the Caribbean entered a cycle of profound reconfiguration of capitalism, characterized by: the rise of new radicalized right-wing movements, articulated through digital platforms (Borisonik, 2025); the consolidation of neo-extractivism, now associated with critical minerals and intensive agro-exports (Svampa, 2019); territorial militarization and the expansion of illegal economies (Gago, 2019); the expansion of precarious employment, with platform work playing a central role and the unequal impact of Artificial Intelligence on the workforce (Antunes, 2020); and accelerated socio-ecological deterioration, with setbacks in environmental protection, water crises, fires, and the dispossession of entire communities (Oliveira and Aguilar, 2022). New forms of state, paramilitary, and drug-related violence have reconfigured ways of inhabiting and organizing community life, especially regarding women's bodies (Segato, 2005). However, we have also witnessed the emergence of feminist, Indigenous, Afro-descendant, student, community, and rainforest peoples' movements that are challenging meanings, future horizons, and ways of reproducing life beyond capital and the state.

Against this backdrop, between 2023 and 2025, our Working Group sought to reflect on the problems and struggles for anti-capitalist and diverse worlds. We produced and published newsletters addressing relevant topics in Latin America, namely: #5: Life Experiences and Anti-Capitalist Organization; #6: The Economy of Popular Sectors; #7: Zapatismo and Autonomies; #8: The Far Right and Neoliberalism from an Anti-Capitalist Critical Perspective; #9: Emerging Sociabilities at COP 30 (in press), in addition to the book Anti-Capitalist Becomings: Sociabilities, Territories and Autonomies - Experiences from the Global South (2024) and the First International Colloquium on Research: Anti-Capitalisms and Emerging Sociabilities (March 2024).

Meanwhile, the return of progressive governments in several countries did not constitute a restoration of the previous cycle, but rather a strained progressivism, forced to coexist with weakened institutions, social de-democratization, disputes surrounding technological sovereignty, and new geopolitical dependencies. In this context, emerging social movements were forced to reinvent their organizational forms to simultaneously confront precarity, the advance of extractive capital, and the capture of the commons, as was very evident in the case of Mexican indigenous peoples during the self-proclaimed “Fourth Transformation” (López and Rivas, 2020).

The region is experiencing a moment marked by the current multifaceted crisis of capitalism: socio-ecological, institutional, related to the meaning of the commons, and violent. While this crisis has paralyzed a portion of the population, it has also generated new forms of grassroots politicization: community care practices, processes of territorial re-existence, self-organized networks in response to violence, experiences of popular ecofeminism, anti-racist and anti-patriarchal artistic and cultural practices, autonomous pedagogies, food and energy sovereignty initiatives, and experiments in community autonomies that transcend the institutional frameworks of the State and capital (Makaran and Brancaleone, 2024; Oliveira, 2025).

These popular resistance fronts are situated, in fact, within a context of experiments and new languages ​​operated by neoliberal, de-democratizing, and demophobic forces (Aguiar, 2025). Simultaneously, the political action of Generation Z and sectors of the population committed to neoliberal-conservative ranks challenges us to consider the emergence of dissonant social movements and forms of social interaction, as well as to critically analyze political discourses that seek to "democratize" capital and exalt capitalism as a solution to poverty. Likewise, 21st-century capitalism—platform capitalism, the app economy, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Srnicek, 2018)—constitutes a distinct apparatus of extraction that interferes with traditional and/or emerging forms of social interaction.

Our approach for 2026–2028 proposes to understand and support contemporary forms of anti-capitalist struggle, their organizational and intersubjective transformations, their territorial and affective roots, and the ways in which they contest meaning in the face of far-right projects, the limitations of progressivism, and the capitalist offensive, such as global neo-extractivism. We seek to do so by paying close attention to the disruptions of capitalism in its current stage, to communal horizons and popular ecofeminisms, and to the resurgence of collective practices of autonomy, care, and defense of territories, while also encouraging innovations in public policies that attempt to transform the State—that is, those that focus on the redistribution of wealth, as well as those that build political cultures of participation and commitment to the commons. Indeed, we are interested in investigating the conjunction of democratic public policies financed by the State that assume the centrality of democratic participation in a broad sense, which involves exploring the ways in which policies with public funding but with collective management by non-state organizations are exercised.

Our situated perspective, therefore, stems from the recognition that emerging Latin American and Caribbean social structures constitute prefigurations of the future (Ouviña, 2007), where horizons of decommodification, depatriarchalization, decolonization, and radical sustainability are being tested in the face of a capitalism in a phase of multidimensional crisis. These experiences not only resist but also produce worlds, knowledge, and power from below. The challenge of the Working Group is to articulate, strengthen, and make visible these collective productions at a time when the commons are under open dispute.

We aim to promote a transdisciplinary, collective analytical perspective, bringing together young and established researchers in an intergenerational dialogue. We are expanding our membership, with a greater presence of researchers from the Caribbean. For the 2026-2028 period, we are establishing an alliance with the Working Group on Feminisms, Resistance, and Emancipation, based on: 1) our joint work within the Inter-Working Group Commission for the Elimination of Gender Violence from within academia; and 2) the shared conceptual affinities between our Working Groups. The protagonism of women in the form of social movements against capital and the tools of feminism have emerged strongly at the heart of the analysis of the Working Group on Acyse researchers. Therefore, this alliance is intended to strengthen the research agendas of both Working Groups, particularly in the areas of: a) the crisis of democracy and resistance movements; and b) feminist economies, care, and the global crisis.

Although it is undeniable that modern social theory was configured as an intellectual expression of the capitalist civilizational project, it is also true that this process generated its own reverse: a critical and reflective movement that, from the roots of socialism in its Marxist and anarchist forms, historically positioned itself in anti-capitalism (the term anti-capitalism was initially associated with forms of resistance to modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries).

The shift of the 1990s, driven by the cycle of anti-neoliberal and alter-globalization struggles and movements, opened a different scenario. The term anti-capitalism began to be used from a renewed position of enunciation: no longer solely as an ideology, political discourse, or militant project, but also as a reference to an empirically observable reality. This inflection expressed the profound mutations of capitalism during the second half of the 20th century: new dynamics of accumulation based on global deregulation, the weakening of national economic circuits, and the retreat of the state, with the consequent erosion of rights previously considered firmly established. Forms of sociability expanded, marked by the "void" produced by the dissolution of socialist-oriented state projects and the bureaucratization of parties and unions (Klein, 2001). This capitalism has sought—and continues to attempt— to inscribe in the social imaginary the idea of ​​a world without antagonisms (Boltanski and Chiapelo, 2002; Virno, 2008).

It was precisely with this capitalism—that is, neoliberal capitalism—that the clash inaugurated by the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, and subsequently by the alter-globalization rebellions, occurred. This conceptual horizon has been fundamental for understanding and complicating both anti-capitalist struggles and the new social forms emerging in the context of the reconfiguration of the Latin American and Caribbean political field. From this framework, we developed an analytically fruitful distinction between two dimensions of anti-capitalism: one discursive, normative, or ideological—related in most cases to the role of the State as a path to revolution and to the operative power of political discourses in shaping the social imaginary and the margins of collective action—and another empirical, referring to social processes, practices, and structures, as we developed in the Working Group's book published in 2020.

Both dimensions can be linked. On the one hand, there is the discourse aimed at overcoming capitalist societies, that is, the intention of certain social actors to transform or break the existing order. On the other hand, a set of experiences and social phenomena unfolds—in the economic, political, cultural, and community spheres—that prefigure relationships capable of challenging the logics of accumulation, domination, and exploitation inherent in capitalism (López, 2015).

To refer to these practices and representations, we use the concept of emergent sociabilities, emphasizing their empirical elements, that is, the concrete construction of non-capitalist ways of life (those opposed to capital or that curb capital's plunder). It is crucial to underline that relationships based on cooperation, horizontality, mutual support, or respect for differences do not in themselves constitute emergent sociabilities or expressions of anti-capitalism. They only acquire this status when they generate interactive arrangements that empower individuals and foster self-organizing dynamics capable of materializing potential emancipatory sociohistorical configurations (Brancaleone, 2015; Zibechi, 2008).

Despite the transformations that have redefined actors and societies in the first decades of the 21st century, capitalism continues to generate its own antagonists. While the class-based paradigm remains useful for understanding certain dynamics of mobilization against capital, the fragmentation of labor—increasingly deepened by financialization and the unequal integration of technologies—and the incorporation of diverse sectors into state institutions have opened up space for movements that, although heterogeneous, share characteristics that we can consider anti-systemic and anti-capitalist. In the most diverse regions of Latin America, the struggles in defense of territory to halt the advance of neo-extractivism and megaprojects, to give one emblematic example, have defined new ways of fighting for life—human and non-human—and of understanding and analyzing, from an academic perspective, the new configurations of the capitalist social system and the resistance movements.

In relation to the above, the socio-ecological problem has become central, consolidating itself as one of the most visible aspects of the current crisis of capitalism (Svampa and Viale, 2020). The expansion of intensive extractive models, the financialization of the natural environment, the deepening climate crisis, and the growing territorial conflict surrounding strategic minerals, agribusiness, and mega-infrastructure projects demonstrate that the current accumulation regime increasingly depends on dynamics of dispossession, environmental devastation, and the precarization of life (Leff, 2019). These processes not only erode the material bases of social reproduction but also catalyze new forms of community organization, territorial defense, and the production of alternatives that challenge hegemonic development logics (Escobar, 2010), in which women's movements (Maneiro, 2024) or popular ecofeminisms are of enormous relevance (Fernández Bouzo and Tobías, 2021).

In fact, it is no small matter to consider the role that public policies and certain institutional mechanisms play in reshaping the aforementioned dynamics. In a regional context marked by the struggle between democratizing trends and authoritarian impulses—including neo- or proto-fascist ideologies that spread through disinformation, violence, and corporate capture of the state—opening the state to popular participation remains a desire of countless social movements. While it is true that there will always be a risk of co-optation when these movements claim the right to participate in the design and oversight of public policies (Falchetti, 2017), examples such as Brazil and its participatory institutions (Avritzer, 2008) or Argentina in the management of social programs (Perelmiter, 2016) demonstrate that it is possible to participate effectively in the production of public policies (Pires, 2011). However, the persistence of highly hierarchical, bureaucratized, or privately-captured state structures also imposes limits and tensions that necessitate problematizing the link between institutionality and participation, so that spaces for participation do not end up as mere “spaces for listening” (Teixeira, 2014). Examining how these policies enable, restrict, or transform emerging social interactions is crucial for understanding the state dimension of capitalism in its current stage.

In this new phase, identifying and characterizing these emerging social structures is crucial for understanding the transformations in the regional context. For the next period (2026-2028), we propose to deepen the conceptual framework we have been developing as a Working Group, expanding our analytical frameworks based on the categories and collective experiences that have emerged or been reconfigured in response to recent changes in Latin America and the Caribbean—including, in particular, the Cuban case, whose analysis presents an additional challenge.