Abstract

Taking the work of Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism, as a point of departure, this essay explores the concept of pensiero debole (weak thought) and its application to progressive contemporary Latin American governments, which the authors describe as “communist in spirit.” The essay embraces pensiero debole as a method to disagree with Vattimo and Zabala’s assessment and to contrast the policies of state capitalism carried out by those governments to the praxis of anti-systemic social movements engaged in a reformulation of territorial autonomy consonant with what John Holloway calls Change the World Without Taking Power.