Pobladores and students resisting neoliberal capitalism in Chile

The chapter explicitly tackles the ways in which we can account for the possibility of social critique today, discussing the utopian, the normative and political-aesthetic moments of social movements’ practices of social critique. By considering both the pobladores and the student movements in relation to the dimensions of social critique sketched in the previous chapters, Rodríguez turns to an exploration of the topics of autonomy, the complex relationship between the movements and Chilean state apparatus and the use of rights claims as a framework for the movements’ demands. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the pobladores and students’ processes of subjectification with an appraisal of a critical sociology of social movements capable of thinking and practising the idea of critique as resistance.