Lessons from Praxis: Autonomy and Spatiality in Contemporary Latin American Social Movements

In the course of the 20th century, left-libertarian thought and praxis never ceased to be present in Latin America, even during the most difficult years of competition with Marxism-Leninism and of military repression. But it was above all from the 1990s onwards that particularly original kinds of libertarian thought and praxis began to flourish there. Alongside more or less renewed versions of classical anarchism, new forms of praxis and analysis emerged at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century; from Mexican neo-Zapatism to a part of Argentina's piqueteros to some expressions of Brazil's sem-teto movement, many new movements and ideas have developed in the last two decades. These new movements are at the same time remarkably libertarian and by no means reducible to the very honourable but somewhat too restrictive label anarchism. In fact, many of them are clearly hybrid, in the sense that they are products of both left-libertarian and Marxist influences. Typically, these Latin American movements share a commitment to principles such as horizontality, self-management and decentralism (which have never been part of Marxism's typical repertoire of practices and principles); moreover, autonomy is a key notion for most of them. Furthermore, spatial practices, territorialisation among them, are proving decisive for many movements and protest actions. The concept of territory is one of those geographical concepts that have been intensely subjected, in recent decades, to strong attempts of redefinition and debugging. In this paper, the territory is fundamentally seen (as a first approximation) as a space defined and delimited by and through power relations, and it is important to see that power (both heteronomous and autonomous power) is exerted only with reference to a territory and, very often, by means of a territory. The kind of power exerted by emancipatory social movements does not constitute an exception to this rule.