The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America

The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope is a 2015 book by the Argentine-British sociologist Ana Cecilia Dinerstein.

Synopsis

The book offers a critical review and reconceptualisation of the concept and practice of autonomy, in light of the experiences of the radical social movements that emerged in Latin America towards the end of the 20th century.  Dinerstein argues that conventional understandings of autonomous social movements, as fighting against power, and striving for social change outside of traditional political parties, are insufficient to understand these movements and their implications for bringing about radical social change in the 21st century. Based in the Open Marxist school of thought and drawing on the mid-20th century German philosopher Ernest Bloch, particularly his understanding of reality as an open process and hope as the human anthropological impulse to explore what is ‘not yet’, the book offers a conceptualisation of autonomy  as a ‘prefigurative praxis’ entailing four simultaneous modes of 'negation', 'creation', 'contradiction' and 'excess' (p.13). These four modes of autonomous praxis are developed in the text in light of the experiences of, respectively, the Zapatista uprising in 1994, the unemployed workers movement in Argentina in 2001-2002, the indigenous movements in Bolivia between 2000-2005  and landless workers’ movements (MST) in Brazil.  

The reconceptualisation of autonomy as a multifaceted process of prefiguration ‘in the key of hope’ or ‘the art of organising hope’, offered in the text aims to transcend the political and theoretical cul-de-sacs in which theorists and activists are ‘forced to opt for either autonomy or state; for taking power or remaining marginal... ultimately for ending up with either integration or rebellion’, while simultaneously avoiding the limitations of ‘fatalist critique or naïve optimism that too often pervade debates on autonomy’.  

Reception

It has been described as a ‘truly significant contribution not just to academic thinking on the subject of autonomy, but to the potential of making it– of operationalising it–in practice’, ‘a much-needed alimentation for the radical imagination’, and ‘a major contribution to minor Marxism’. Writing in the journal Radical Philosophy, Jeff Webber while praising the books 'genuinely novel arguments that adjust our horizons from "autonomy and the state" to the prefigurative potential of social movements in a Blochian frame of hope' questions Dinerstein's insistence that such movements are inherently suspicious of the state and 'reject state power in principle' suggesting that her position 'flattens out the region's much more complex concrete history...and is difficult to sustain empirically'.

In 2016 Artist Collective Victoria Deluxe and twelve other organisations from the cultural sector, academia, the media and civil society in Belgium developed a joint European research project ‘The Art of Organising Hope (TAOH)’ named after the subtitle of the book and directly citing it as their inspiration. Their stated goal was ‘to find and discover ideas, collaborations, practices and structures around Europe that might foster a different societal order’. The culmination of the project was a four day summit ‘New Narratives for Europe’ held in multiple venues in Ghent, Belgium on  8-11 November 2018.

In 2018 the Centre for the Study of Rural Development (CESDER), an educational NGO in Zautla, Puebla, Mexico ran a summer school around the idea of Art of Organising Hope for 70 MSc students and leaders from rural local communities.