Power and representation: The State we carry within

Abstract

The article addresses the problem of power from the standpoint of social struggle, highlighting a little-explored aspect: the symbolic domination that has shaped it. The internalization of cultural forms of domination by radical social subjects may help explain the failure of movements that set out to transform capitalist modernity. It shows how some major social movements in Latin America have begun to exhibit forms of organization that question the vertical and repressive culture of a State-oriented left, as part of a complex process of building a different antagonistic subjectivity and a new subject.