The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America

An explosion of rage and hope irrupted and expanded throughout the Latin American region at the end of the twentieth century. A general sense of injustice felt by millions asserted itself as a series of demonstrations, mobilisations, struggles, strikes, uprisings and upheavals against neoliberal politics and policy. These collective actions undertaken by citizen, popular, labour and indigenous movements embraced ‘autonomy’ as the tool to resist structural adjustments, and their social, economic and political consequences. These protests and mobilizations soon developed into organizing tools for both to critique capitalism, patriarchal society, coloniality and to explore alternative relations and sociabilities beyond them.

What is ‘autonomy’? The concept of autonomy has been historically the subject of enquiry by both scholar and activists alike but it has recently come under acute examination, generating worldwide debates about new social movements, power, politics, the state, policy and radical change. The reason is that for the past two decades the claim and practice of collective autonomy – in pursuit of self-determination, self-management, self-representation and self-government – independently from the state and institutionalised form of labour and party politics, have served new rural and urban movements to revitalised and push forward those legacies of other radical moments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The principle of autonomy has also become a new ‘paradigm of resistance’ for indigenous movements (Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2010) relatively recently, and has been applied to the defence of self-government, indigenous legality and territoriality against new paradigms domination such as ‘multiculturalism’ (Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2010: 67). Multiculturalism emerged as a counter-paradigm to control indigenous resistance since the demand from the indigenous for the right to self-affirmation and self-determination together with the right to communal property of the land became part of the international agenda of the UN and other organisations, and new policy frameworks informed by the idea of diversity emerged to integrate this demand into the nation-state policies.

The aim of this chapter is to produce an alternative understanding of autonomy that engages with the movements’ processes of prefiguration. I offer a definition of autonomy as the art of organising hope. I examine the previously mentioned four modes of autonomy through the prism of Ernst Bloch’s philosophy. By paraphrasing the language of music, I put autonomy in the key of hope. This means that, as a ‘composer’, I use hope as my basic material. If I make use of other concepts, notions and ideas, I will point to the way they are modified by the category of hope. A reading of autonomy in the key of hope repositions the debate about autonomy in three ways. First, it moves away from the dichotomy ‘autonomy vs the state’ by revealing the prefigurative nature of autonomy without avoiding the problem of the state and capital; second, it overcomes the fragmented understanding of autonomy; third, it bridges indigenous and non-indigenous autonomous practices.

All of them out! Much has been written about the Argentine financial crisis and the popular insurrection of December 2001, and their legacies. But today the slogan of the popular insurrection of December 2001, i.e. ‘¡Que se vayan tod@s!’ (referred to as ‘QSVT now onwards) sounds like a beautiful melody that brings nostalgia. Just before the new default of the external debt in 2014 as a result of the pressure from the so called ‘vulture funds’ the country’s economy was stable and the GDP growing. Back to normal the political debate refocused on institutional politics after a period when society had been at the centre of politics. Like in the old times, with the arrival of a new Peronist government to power, society became divided into pro (Kirchneristas) and against (anti-Kirchneristas). Yet, the negation voiced in the event that reverted hopelessness in Argentina remains lurking, indescribable, still unanswered: ‘the desiderium, the only honest attribute of all men, is unexplored’ (Bloch, 1959/1986: 5).

In this chapter, I discuss the third mode of autonomous organising (i.e., contradiction) by looking at the struggles of indigenous-popular movements in present Bolivia. Autonomy (self-determination and self-government) is an ancestral practice among indigenous people in Latin America, but it became a new ‘paradigm of resistance’ (Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2010) relatively recently. As a ‘discourse, a practice and a legality’, autonomy became a ‘new political paradigm’ (Patzi Paco, 2004: 187) that positioned them vis-à-vis other paradigms (Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2010: 66).

At the start of the new millennium we find the rural world everywhere to be in a state of crisis. The historical origins of this crisis, in the nations of the South, can be found in colonial land grabs and the displacement of farming peoples from fertile lands with adequate rainfall, toward steep, rocky slopes, desert margins, and infertile rainforest soils, and the progressive incorporation of these displaced peoples into poorly paid seasonal labor forces for export agriculture. As a result of this legacy, only slightly modified in the post colonial period, the landless and near landless have long made up the poorest of the poor.

This statement made by the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina (VC) in a joint paper with the International NGO/CSO Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) at the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) in January 2006 (VC and IPC, 2006: 6), tells us about an ongoing state of affairs: the problem of landlessness and the conflicts over the land are pervasive features of the new millennium.