ABSTRACT
Social movements have been central to the process of democratization, and their role has suggested a new notion of citizenship, one that is being constructed by the disenfranchised and that transcends both liberal bourgeois conceptions and authoritarian practices of the state. The notion of citizenship is no longer confined to the access to defined rights, but it is a historical construction whose specificity arises from struggle itself. In a society in which inequality is so internalized as to constitute the cultural forms through which people relate to each other in everyday life, the notion of equal rights which characterizes the idea of citizenship has to confront the authoritarian culture which permeates all social relations. Emphasizing the constitution of active, autonomous subjects and the socialization of politics, the building of new citizenship points towards the socialization of power underlying a radical conception of democracy.
