Book Review: A New Understanding

of Autonomy in Latin America

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein. 2015. The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The
Art of Organising Hope. Hampshire, England: Palgrave McMillan. 282 pp.
$105.00, Hardcover.

Reviewed by Alberto Lozano Vazquez

The book by Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, an expert scholar in Latin American and
contentious politics, explores autonomy and collective social struggles based
on organized hope as a tool for true and affordable social transformation.
The book is well structured in different sections—two forewords, an introduction,
three main parts containing the essential contribution, a final section of notes, a vast
bibliography, and a useful index of concepts, names, and places. As a whole, the
volume offers a scholarly, comprehensive analysis of autonomy in Latin America.
In the introduction, the author offers a clear, interesting explanation of her
approach and key concepts such as autonomy, as well as other concepts relat-
ed to it such as prefiguration, rebellion, institutionalization (or integration), and
hope; hope is seen through the intellectual lenses of the German philosopher
Ernst Bloch. Subsequently, there are three sections that complement each oth-
er; the first part (Theorising Autonomy) deals with the difficult task of theoriz-
ing and defining concepts. The author explores the meaning of autonomy in
four modes—negation, creation, contradiction, and excess.
In the second part (Navigating Autonomy), Dr. Dinerstein explores empirically
four cases in Latin America to make her point on autonomy—Mexico, Argentina,
Bolivia, and Brazil. She provides details on the different dimensions of autono-
my—negation, creation, contradiction, and excess—for each case. To explore the
Mexican case, she takes the Zapatistas or the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional
(EZLN) in the southern state of Chiapas, which sought indigenous autonomy in
1994. In Argentina, the analysis is focused on the popular insurrection of December
2001, identified as “Que se vayan tod@s!,” which attempted to achieve dignified
work and democratization. The next case is Bolivia, where the author analyzes the
indigenous-popular movements that came to be known for the phrase ¡El agua es
nuestra carajo!, considering oil and water wars against the privatization of natural
resources. Finally, the author explores the Brazilian case, analyzing the Movimiento
dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), identified also with the phrase “¡A desal-
ambrar!,” against landlessness and in favor of peasant-led agrarian reform. All these
Latin American cases help to illustrate the different modes of autonomy described
by the author.1

Latin American Policy—Volume 8, Number 1—Pages 149–153

C 2017 Policy Studies Organization. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
V
150 Latin American Policy

The third part (Rethinking Autonomy) represents an intellectual exercise

defying theoretical boundaries and dealing with autonomy as a real abstrac-
tion. In this section, the author resorts to Marx’s critique of political economy
in the key of hope, or as she calls it, the prefigurative critique of political economy
(and its categories), a prefigurative method and epistemology that takes us
beyond what is considered as real and naturally given within capitalism. The
author shows us how we take for granted capitalist notions of reality and
how, with her vision of autonomy and organizing hope, we (as societies) can
prefigure alternative realities that go beyond the imposed notions of capital-
ist, patriarchal, colonial realities. It is an important epistemological contribu-
tion, since Dr. Dinerstein’s prefigurative critique of political economy
presupposes and proposes seeing a new reality (ontology) and acquiring new
knowledge from it (epistemology).2 For her, it is part of the genesis of an
imagined-prefigured-possible-not-yet reality.
The book departs from the need for a new approach to autonomy. In this
sense, it is a scholarly work with the dose of abstraction needed to explore
the complexities of autonomy, emancipation, social movements, human
improvement, communitarian organization, and the imagination of a better
world. The exploration of such aspects is made in relation to and beyond the
role of state, law, and money within the framework of radical social inquiry.
Importantly, autonomy as a form and as a tool of prefiguration—under-
stood as a process with the embedded imagination of a better world—is
linked strongly to the category of “hope,” which in turn is visible in the Latin
American movement’s autonomous praxis.
In Dr. Dinerstein’s work, the element of hope is fundamental; it is not
naive, delusional, or unaffordable (or, as she says, fantasy or wish) but is a
previous, necessary component for individual and social struggle and change.
As the author puts it, “Without hope there is no politics.”
Based on the intellectual work of the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, Dr.
Dinerstein elaborates on the category of hope as the highway to arrive to a
desired and imagined “not-yet-reality” in Latin America’s society and poli-
tics, not within or as a teleological path but rather as an open process in con-
struction. The current Latin American reality is neither absolute nor given
but is open and susceptible to change. If properly prefigured, the politics of
autonomy charged with hope can lead to real emancipation.
Dr. Dinerstein provides a portrayal of autonomy as the art of organizing hope. As
she writes, “Organizing hope means a collective pursuit towards the realization of
what does not yet exist for each of the movements in question and the concrete antic-
ipation of such unrealised reality in the present.” For her, the not yet can be repre-
sented as dignified work, self-management, democracy, popular justice, agrarian
reform, or indigenous self-determination. In her view, these not-yets are the major
motivation behind the politics of autonomy in Latin America since the 1980s.
The book also presents an effort to overcome traditional and universal
understandings of autonomy that do not fit with the specific situations expe-
rienced by different indigenous-rural-popular movements in Latin America.
Organizing hope is not something that has been or can be done completely or
something that will be done in the future but rather something that is happen-
ing (in present continuous tense, as the author asserts). Organizing hope is a
 Book Review 151

process; autonomous struggles are an ongoing and at the same time prefigura-
tive praxis. For Dr. Dinerstein, the new quality and the key feature of the cur-
rent Latin American social movements is the prefiguration of alternative
realities with political imagination; in other words, she describes such prefigu-
ration as the process of learning hope, being autonomy the organizational tool for
this process useful to “resist structural adjustments and their consequences.”
We are able to identify that the book has a deep emancipatory sense
against the state, beyond the state, and without the state (and all the things
that can be—or not—related to it: patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, corrupt
bureaucracies, oppressive law, inequality, unnecessary and unjustified repres-
sion, hopelessness, indebtedness, dispossession, and so on). In the same line,
there is also an implicit challenge to the fear that is traditionally infused by
the state, as the maximum institutional apparatus possessing the legitimacy of
the use of violence, in Weberian terms.
For Dr. Dinerstein, the question is not if we can achieve radical change or
revolution without taking the power of the state but how the capitalist state
copes or mediates with the radical change brought about by prefigurative
power of autonomous organizing.
There are a few limitations to the book, such as the audience that the book
can reach to be effective empirically. Not everyone participating in social
movements or collective social struggles from below in Latin America reads
English. Furthermore, many people are not directly or indirectly familiarized
with the literature of Latin American politics or the subdiscipline of Compar-
ative Politics, specifically on social movements, revolutions, democracies and
democratization, and contentious politics in general. The book should be
translated into Spanish or Portuguese for the communities to which it is
directed and where it could have more of an effect. A version in indigenous
languages would be very complicated, given the linguistic diversity that
exists. In other words, the book has a limited reach with those who have
inspired it, but this fact does not diminish its virtue as well-crafted and far-
reaching academically. There are English-speaking academic and nonacadem-
ic audiences equally important to and interested in the analysis of Latin
American politics and the possibilities of social transformation, and the book
is published by Palgrave Macmillan, an academic editor with a global reach.
Another minor aspect in which the book could deepen the analysis is
regarding corruption within the social struggles (i.e., social movements,
unions, and others) that could perhaps be categorized in Dr. Dinerstein’s con-
tradiction mode of autonomy, hindering the legitimate aims, progress, and
dynamics of any social struggle or movements (inner corruption would not be
related directly to the state).
Finally, it would be helpful to include a brief explanation of why, when,
and how the phrase “The art of hope” could be a contradiction in terms. The
author does a great job explaining her concepts and definitions, but she could
perhaps provide a scenario in which the combination and the meanings of
the words “art” and “hope” might be in conflict, creating an oxymoron—if
such is the case—given that even though it can be subjective and personal,
“art” can fall within the parameters of a “method,” whereas “hope” remains
linked to a notion of personal “wish,” “confidence,” or “desire.”
152 Latin American Policy

In general terms, Dr. Dinerstein’s book takes on special importance for Lat-
in American politics in the current critical juncture of the Americas, particu-
larly given the political, social, cultural, economic, and legal situation in the
United States as of January 2017. This situation is not unique to the Americas.
There is a worldwide tendency to elect governments with ideas inclined
toward the extreme right. Conservatism, intolerance to others, racism, class-
ism, exclusion, discrimination, and nationalism open their own spaces to the
detriment of inclusion, diversity, equity, the rights of others, and recognition
of those who are different. In these societies, minorities lose. Aggressions,
fragmentations, and divisions emerge and become part of everyday life. For
this reason, this book, which elaborates and analyzes from an ontological
position close to the left in a world with right-leaning tendencies, takes on an
increased academic, intellectual, political, and social value.
Autonomy and the exercise of reasoned, creative resistance, with a sense of
history, democracy, and future, acquires more value and relevance in an atmo-
sphere of repression from governments of dangerous and extreme National-
isms. In this context and taking Dr. Dinerstein’s contribution, the politics of
autonomy, autonomy itself, and the exercise of prefiguration (an anticipation of
a desirable future that is not yet in the present, and as the process of learning
hope) have big challenges to overcome under this critical juncture.
This book is useful to think about our present societies, since one of the
meanings of autonomy is that it seeks to reorganize society from below, from
the communities, as a way of recovering the sense of the common, the soli-
darity, the values, and the actions from below that lead to another type of
societal organization, based on and oriented toward fairer and more-equitable
and redistributive values and norms, keeping hope as a driving force.
Scholars, students of Latin American politics, critical activists, social and
political leaders, nongovernmental organizations, decision makers, and the gen-
eral public could benefit from reading this book, which offers important new
insight on a renovated understanding if autonomy for the twenty-first century.

About the Author

Alberto Lozano Vazquez is the director of the Isidro Fabela Institute of
International Studies and a full-time research professor at Universidad del
Mar, Campus Huatulco, Oaxaca, Mexico. He holds a PhD in International
Relations and Comparative Politics from the University of Miami. He also
serves as the Secretary-General of the Mexican International Studies Associa-
tion (AMEI) for the 2015–2017 term and is a Level-1 National Researcher
(SNI) with the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT),
Mexico, for the 2017–2019 period.

Notes
1
It is evident that Dr. Dinerstein’s book treats the examples as separate cases that help to make a
theoretical point on autonomy, and by no means do they represent a regional or global effort of such
social movements. Based on Tarrow and Tilly (2007), we could say that there is not much place in a
globalized world for global or regional coherent and well-coordinated social movements because,
“there are enormous cultural gaps, differences in interests and values, and high transaction costs
involved in trying to connect activists across borders” (p. 456).
 Book Review 153

2
Kenneth Roberts (2008) expresses a similar sense of resistance to accept the reality derived from
the global political economy (that follows a perceived inertia of inequality), noting that, “Social
resistance has thus punctured the aura of inexorability that surrounded the trends toward economic
liberalization and globalization in the waning decades of the twentieth century” (p. 328).

References
Roberts, K. M. (2008). The mobilization of opposition to economic liberalization. Annual Reviews
of Political Science, 11, 327–349.
Tarrow, S., & Tilly, C. (2007). Contentious politics and social movements. In C. Boix and S. C. Stokes
(Eds.), The Oxford handbook of comparative politics (pp. 435–460). Oxford: Oxford University.