Juventude, participação e projeto popular: a experiência político-organizativa do Movimento "Levante Popular da Juventude"

Abstract

This research analyzes the collective action of Levante Popular da Juventude (LPJ), a social movement that presents some current typologies concerning the meaning and forms of political participation. Though it presents an analysis of aspects and nationwide overview of LPJ’s political production, this study looks into its activity in the city of Natal, RN. During the investigative process, we point the references from which the movement responds to political organizational challenges for developing a popular project. We analyze its activistic practice from the network of social relationships, meanings and contradictions that instill some dynamism to its activity as a collective subject. Subjective aspects of activist youth’s political culture are related to facts of objective reality – economic situation, crises and political tensions. Thus we consider the context of socioeconomic, political and cultural transformations that influenced the changing of focuses, forms and experiences of activism in Latin American and Brazilian social movements and actors. In this sense, the Gramscian concept of hegemony helps us out at analyzing forms of domination and subordination to the processes of social organization that characterize the contexts in which the organized youth groups develop real, cultural actions of denunciation, struggle and resistance. We also deploy Raymond Williams’ cultural materialism in order to think the dynamics of the processes for the production of reality from practices and participation experiences of that young collective subject, considering the perspectives of the “residual” and the “emergent”.