December 5, 2025

Human Rights in Contemporary Societies

José Manuel Mendes , Mariana Barbosa e Teresa Cunha

Over the past few decades, reflecting on social transformation has almost inevitably meant engaging in the question of autonomy. From the 1970s onward, in the wake of significant events such as May '68 in France, Operaismo in Italy, the strengthening of libertarian movements in Spain, and the emergence of indigenous autonomist movements in Latin America, among others, the term autonomy became established as a central concept in critical theory and revolutionary practice. This marked the beginning of what came to be known as a movement towards autonomy, giving rise to a new orientation toward social transformation, which this dissertation refers to as the autonomist orientation. This perspective represents a point of rupture and disillusionment with the models of social transformation that characterized much of the Left from the twentieth century, namely, the social democracy of the Second International, the communism of the Third International, and the national liberation movements primarily located in Africa and Latin America. At that point, the hope for a better world underwent a historical turning point. For the autonomist orientation, many political obstacles stem from questions of political form. Emancipation is hampered when the state, parliament, and political parties occupy the core of social struggles. In this context, the action of the traditional workers' movement ceases to be unquestionable, since exploited subjectivities go beyond the classic proletariat, and revolution no longer depends on a single revolutionary subject leading the process. Hence, six fundamental dimensions emerge: the critique of mediation, the autonomous form, the diversity of subjectivities, the centrality of everyday life, collaborative commons, and territorialization. This thesis examines the various historical and current meanings of the idea of autonomy and its implications for social and political action. In addition to analyzing the main theorists who supported autonomy in the aforementioned sense, it revisits both historical and contemporary, competing and divergent perspectives. It also explores the meanings of autonomy adopted by collaborative commons projects, such as social centers, ecological communities, cooperatives, and other social and solidarity economy initiatives, which collectively operationalize the notion of autonomy across multiple fronts. Furthermore, the thesis addresses changes in the formulation of autonomist political horizons during a period so often described as the end of history, drawing on concepts such as utopia, prefiguration, and hope. Since the empirical focus of this study is the Iberian Peninsula, it also describes the historical and social circumstances, past and present, that facilitate the emergence of concrete practices and meanings of autonomy in this region. It shows that these experiences of autonomy manifest in diverse configurations: some well-intentioned but poorly structured, others potentially in contradiction with emancipatory aspirations. In this regard, the dissertation discusses the inherent difficulties in constructing subjectivity within collaborative commons guided by autonomy. Based on the case studies and a meta-theoretical analysis, the thesis ultimately seeks to reclaim a critical notion of autonomy that fosters active hope in transformative horizons and tries to respond to the main challenges of political subjectivity in our time.

Keywords: autonomy, utopia, prefiguration, hope, political subjectivity