Abstract
The question of how to conceptualize and organize alternatives to capitalism amid capitalism is today at the core of intense debate across the social sciences. As critical organizational scholars, we commonly draw on contemporary political (economic) theory and the burgeoning literature on social movements and grassroots initiatives in our attempts to theoretically and politically come to grip with the question of radical social change. In particular, we are collectively searching for new vocabularies that allow us to enhance the prefigurative power of critical organizational scholarship and to recover a role in society that is predicated on formulating critique yet not exhausted by it.
Ana Dinerstein’s The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope offers such a vocabulary. She observes that, in the past two decades, we have witnessed a turning point in the activity of autonomous social movements, which have come to prefigure alternatives with political imagination. The prefigurative power of these experiences allows to move beyond the historical impasse within the left on whether alternative to capitalism should be built by taking the power of the state or outside capitalism altogether. Social movements in the North have historically been characterized by their struggles against the state, as anti-politics, and the abandonment of the struggle to reclaim the state as the means for emancipation in favor of autonomy in the interstices (Holloway, 2002). From this historically and geographically specific experience, contemporary theorizations of social movements and autonomy are drawn which, despite sweeping claims, are in no way universal.
To decolonize current understandings of autonomy, Dinerstein brings a variety of experiences in Latin America into the conversation, ranging from the Zapatista’s movement in Mexico, the urban experiments in Argentina after the crisis, the indigenous-popular movements in Bolivia, and the rural movement in Brazil. Latin American indigenous autonomy, she holds, is grounded in a cosmology that understands the political in a different way, as one that ‘exceeds’ common notions of the political which identify it with the state. The experiences of autonomy of indigenous people in the South should be understood in terms of the defense of territorial spaces and the recognition of self-determination and self-government by the state, against modernity/capitalism, coloniality, and the development paradigm. Therefore, the struggle is one against colonization and oppression, rather than against the state as such, although this latter is recognized as a tool to obtain the legal changes required to regain self-determination and autonomy. Drawing on an alternative ontology from ancestral traditions, the ‘state illusion’ is unmasked, or the idea that the privileged location of the political is the state (cf. Holloway, 2002; Rancière, 1999), to embrace a de-colonizing revolutionary praxis in the present.
As global neoliberal capitalism in Latin America in the 1990s represented a political project of imposing an ‘imaginary of hopelessness’, prefiguration is defined as the process of learning hope and autonomy as the art of organizing it. Prefiguration is traced back to Gramsci (1968), the anarchic politics of the 1960s (Breines, 1989), Maeckelbergh’s (2009) and Gibson-Graham’s (2006) emphasis on process as itself enacting different values, rather than on an end. At the same time, prefiguration is further articulated conceptually by pointing to the key role of hope. To do so, Dinerstein draws on Ernst Bloch’s (1986 [1959]) work, defining hope as a ‘human impulse to explore what is not yet’, to ‘realise what we feel as lack’ (p. 24), and to move forward toward what is not known yet. This determination is anthropological: it makes us human. Grounded in an understanding of reality as an open process, hope is contingent and vulnerable to disappointment.
For autonomy to prefigure alternatives, it should include four modes: the negation of the given; the creation of an alternative; contradiction/struggle against the state, law, and capital; and the production of excess, confronting and transcending the ‘parameters of legibility’ (Vázquez, 2011) of the capitalist demarcation of reality. At the same time, prefiguration should be a decolonizing process of recognition of difference, against the epistemic violence of the West. Indigenous populations specifically have been included into capitalism through ‘real subsumption by exclusion’. Racial oppression and invisibilization constituted necessary conditions for the formation of the working class in Latin America and thus the valorization of capital.
Despite its richness, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Dinerstein’s analysis is how she reconnects the notion of autonomy to Marx’s critique of political economy. She insists that we should understand autonomous organizing as mediated by the capitalist state, law, and money, rather than outside it. Mediations are the political, economic, legal and ‘cultural forms of social relations’, and they are processes, such as monetization, statization, legalization, and so on. They force autonomy to exist in forms that fit the capitalistic/patriarchal/colonial demarcation of reality (Vázquez, 2011). Mediations such as the state or money cannot advance radical change as they are constitutive of relations and our subjectivity. This aligns with Marx’s understanding of money as the concrete expression of value in capitalist societies. Yet, drawing on Gunn (1987), Dinerstein argues that mediation necessarily entails the possibility of de-mediation. Mediations can be transformed through struggle over the meaning of autonomy. While de-centering the state, the law, and the capitalist economy in favor of autonomy, we should remain aware that this latter cannot be grasped independent from the mediations of the former. Critique is, in this sense, necessarily a critique internal to capital. Accordingly, the classical autonomy question about whether power can be seized without taking the state should be reformulated as: How does the capitalist state can cope with the radical change brought about by radical organizing? (p. 22).
The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America will disappoint the reader in search of an in-depth account of the organizational practices of Latin American social movements and autonomy. Yet, Dinerstein’s ambition is of another caliber: it is to offer an alternative demarcation of the question of autonomy. She wants us to move beyond the state as an ‘alter ego’ of autonomy, to understand that alternative is not in the outside, it is a movement inside toward something not yet mediated because still in movement. For this we should hope and struggle, in the awareness that prefiguration is vulnerable and that this entails the possibility of disappointment.
