Las raíces subjetivas y sociales de la pérdida de legitimidad de los regímenes democráticos y del surgimiento de los movimientos sociales actuales

Abstract

This article argues that the movements that initiate with the Arab Spring, continue with the Indignado movement in Madrid and Occupy Wall Street, and continue with the gilets jaunes in France and with the multiple current social movements: Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, Colombia, Mexico, have common sources. Two distinct ones have been pointed out: the great inequality that has emerged in almost all the countries due to financialization and the crisis of legitimacy of the majority of the representative democracies in the world. The first may explain several of the movements in some countries, although it does not reveal everything. The second one, which refers to the crisis of legitimacy of most current governments, is not a crisis of democracy that leads, inevitably, to populism, but a crisis of representative democracy. This article will discuss, in its first section, this crisis of representative democracy and the manner in which the new contemporary social movements demand, and to a certain degree, experience participative democracy. In the second section, I will analyze the subjective sources of the present social malaise that lies at the heart of the present social movements that directly address subjective and cultural issues. Finally, in the third section, I will analyze how several of these subjective claims concern a clash of temporalities: between subjective temporality and social and institutional time as well as, for the first time in the history of mankind, with geological time.