Introduction: Autonomy: Political Theory/Political Anthropology

Oliveira, Gustavo M. de y Modonesi, Massimo. Independence and Emancipation. Latin American Theorizations on the Concept of Autonomy. Latin American Perspectives, Issue 257, Vol. 51 No. 4, July, 25–42, 2024

From the 1990's to the present, Latin America has been, as no other region in the world, a laboratory of autonomies-explicit or implicitly framed as such-situated in the cycle of anti-neoliberal struggles. Faced with this historical-political context, in this text we reexamine the conceptualization and theorizations around the idea of autonomy. Based on a review of the major Latin American conceptual contributions, we have organized our reflections along five lines of theorization: autonomy understood as negation, as independence, as counter-power (and as popular power), as emancipation and as community.

Autonomy is a concept that has seen a rapid rise to prominence in broad (and often conflictive) inter-and intra-Marxist and anarchist debates on political praxis over the last decades. From its early heyday in the 1970s around operaismo tendencies of 1970s Italian Marxism, the French Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the work of scholars such as Murray Bookchin and Harry Cleaver, to its latest manifestation where the social movements of Latin America are often the starting point, most notably in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, John Holloway, Marina Sitrin, and Ana Dinerstein herself, it is an idea that has evolved and transformed in a manner reflective of the political praxis with which it associates.

Latin American Policy, 2017

This paper seeks to categorize the forms of autonomy developed by Indigenous and peasant movements in Latin America into three types: a) de jure autonomies versus de facto autonomies; b) explicit autonomies versus implicit autonomies; and c) (mono)ethnic autonomies versus popular or class autonomies. We argue that the debate between these conceptions takes on a possible strategic importance when it comes to the dialogue between Indigenous and peasant struggles regarding the defense of territory as well as in the conception of peasant autonomy, understood as a strategy of struggle and local selfgovernance.

This paper arises as a result of two closely related preocupations. The first one deals with a future perspective of the new popular movements in Argentina, particularly active since the events of December of 2001. The second one comes from far back, and refers to the role of national states, especially those of the capitalist periphery, like Argentina, in the present world scenario, characterized by globalization and the warlike preponderance of USA. The overall category which links both is the autonomy. On one hand, since the expansion of neoliberal globalization, the " national state " has become a controversial matter. Not only due to his size or format but also its funcionality in the world market. This is very significant for every national state, but it is especially important for the capitalist perifery. The neo liberal policies of the 1990´s, which undermined the economic, social, political and cultural basis of the weakened Latin American democracies, were centred on the full subordination of national states to the logic of circulation and accumulation of capital at global level. This caused the desertion of the state from key roles of social reproduction and, at the same time, a resurgence – disorderly, contradictorily but potentially disruptive– of social practices aimed at confronting or solving the problems brought about by the neo-liberal hegemony. Simultaneously, in recent years, influenced by the local and global struggles, the idea that social emancipation and alternative political construction do not have to conquer state power as their principal goal has spread. Instead of this, emancipation has to start from the potentiality of the collective actions which emerge and take root in civil society to construct " another world ". In this paper, seen from the perspective of the Argentine experience, we try to raise questions about the chances and limits that the concept of autonomy has to gestate and to mantain through time emancipatory collective actions, and analize the contradictory role of the national state for and in political struggle. The crisis of the neoliberal model installed in 1976 by the military dictatorship and taken to its maximun expression during the nineties, exploded in Argentina at the end of 2001. On the 19th and 20th of December, hundred of people protested in the street and provoked the fall of Fernando De la Rúa´s government. The archetypical slogan of those days "que se vayan todos " (QSVT), expressed the absolute, visceral and unanimous rejection to the powerless government and the neoliberal model. The QSVT included the request that the all leaders (specially politicians, but also unionist, judges, businessmen) who had been pushing the country to the disaster disappear.

The politics of autonomy in Latin America. The Art of Organising Hope, 2015

Dinerstein offers a much-needed critical review of the concept and practice of autonomy. Defining autonomy as either revolutionary or ineffective vis-à-vis the state does not fully grasp the commitment of Latin American movements to the creation of alternative practices and horizons beyond capitalism, patriarchy and coloniality. By establishing an elective affinity between autonomy and Bloch’s principle of hope, Dinerstein defines autonomy as ‘the art of organizing hope’, that is, the art of shaping a reality which is not yet but can be anticipated by the movements’ collective actions. Drawing from the experience of four prominent indigenous and non-indigenous urban and rural movements, Dinerstein suggests that the politics of autonomy is a struggle that simultaneously negates, creates, deals with contradictions and, above all, produces an excess beyond demarcation that cannot be translated into the grammar of power. Reading Marx’s method in key of hope, the book offers a prefigurative critique of political economy and emphasises the prefigurative features of indigenous and non indigenous autonomies at a time when utopia can no longer be objected.

SIGUIENDO UNA LINEA DE DEBATE E INVESTIGACIÓN SOBRE LAS POSIBILIDADES REALES DEL ESTADO POSTMODERNO PARA CONVERTIRSE EN UN INSTRUMENTO DE TRANSFORMACIÓN EN LA PERSPECTIVA HEGELIANA-GRAMSCIANA, ADJUNTO ESTE OTRO TRABAJO. FOLLOWING MY INTEREST IN THE DEBATE ABOUT THE POSTMODERN NATION-STATE AND ITS REAL POSSIBILITY TO BECOME AN INSTRUMENT OF SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION , AS DEFINED FROM AN HEGELIAN-GRAMSCIAN POINT OF VIEW, I WANT TO ADD ANOTHER PAPER THAT I CONSIDERED OF HIGH INTEREST

Law has two dimensions: on the one hand, it can be linked to the maintenance of an unjust status quo; but, on the other hand, it can also be an instrument of fight for any social actor. This idea will be developed throughout the analysis of the right to self-determination, object to the present article. Self-determination is a rather old concept understood as self-governance before the states. At the beginning of the twentieth century, social actors recognized this concept as a right, and subsequently as a human right. This article will focus on the notion of self-determination from a theoretical point of view, while also mentioning some historical elements that will complement the historical relevance this right has had. Hence, I will first start by explaining what self-determination meant from John Locke´s standpoint, which is linked to natural law-liberalism. Likewise, I will consider the Marx-Leninists perspective that supported the African decolonization. Finally, I will illustrate how global indigenous movements reinterpreted the notion of self-determination and materialised it through the Bolivian Constitution. With this, the reader will see how law and human rights are both indeterminate and difficult-to-reconcile concepts.