Progressive regimes find themselves in a serious crisis. Those who are not satisfied with denouncing the predictable machinations of "imperialism" should seek the internal reasons for the failure of the proclaimed "socialism of the 21st century". Why have such regimes, which owe their emergence and early successes mainly to the mobilization of the masses, been unable to maintain the active support of the majority of the population? The answer is sought here by resorting to the record of the Latin American left.

This book presents cases of social experiments in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Uruguay. In these spaces, where horizontal and multi-class communication flourished, Jay Winter's concept of minor utopias is suitable. This essay is inspired by Winter's important work, tracing what he calls the "visions of partial transformation," which coexisted temporarily with the great narratives of social transformation, but then lost their proper place in the historical record.

The book offers an in depth balance of the debates that have organized the studies on Latin American popular cultures for the last thirty years. Simultaneously, it proposes new perspectives in times of crisis for the category: the central question is what does the popular mean today? The relationship between popular cultures and mass culture has changed radically in this century, in a way not foreseeable by classical texts.

Latin America is facing a serious environmental crisis, which is leading the subcontinent to a collapse, understood as a shift in society and in the current way of living. This ecological crisis has been intensified by the entrenchment of the neo-liberal economic model and neo-extractivism, which has led to a dispute over common goods.

The destructive features of the late international capitalist order brought the life-and-death relationship to the forefront of social, humanist, ecological and artistic discussion. The processes of poverty and social inequalities have been emphasized, as well as the scenarios of violence and death that involve people, the planet and life itself.

In contemporary societies we observe a state of social inequality as in the Ancien Régime, the concentration of wealth in the "1 percent", billionaires as presidents, the increase of luxury consumption and the emergence of a culture of distinction as well as the concentration of land and spatial segregation. In order to understand these phenomena in a coherent interpretative framework, this essay proposes the hypothesis that we are living in the early 21st century a new conjuncture of re-feudalization.