Abstract

This article addresses the relationship of social work with the movements and processes of popular organisation in Chile and Argentina in the context of the Latin American Reconceptualisation movement in the 1960s and 1970s. We will analyse the current context of the class struggle in these countries and the relationship that was established between social work and the social organisations and movements of the subaltern classes. Our hypothesis is that the relationship between the profession and the struggles developed by the subaltern classes, in their peculiarities in Chile and Argentina, was the central mediation for social work to question its social function in the reproduction of social relations and, as a result, erode its traditionalist and conservative bases.