Autonomism as a Global Social Movement

Despite the consensus opinion that alterglobalism is in crisis and apparently without a clear objective or vehicle for promoting global change through the ineffective World Social Forum “model,” a significant anticapitalist tendency continues to remain active. However, questions remain over autonomism's ability to avoid ghettoizing itself and provide more than intense internal criticism of other more institutionalized and “vertical” currents. Autonomism originated in Europe in the seventies and eighties, specifically around the Autonomia and Autonomen radical social movements in Italy and Germany. Based on Italian workerist theories of worker self‐management and autonomy from the mediating institutions of both capital and labor, the movement has since absorbed strong influences from radical feminism, the North American counterculture, French poststructuralism, neoanarchism, Mexican neo‐Zapatism, and the Argentinean worker‐recuperated factory and self‐management movements.