Transnational Movements for Autonomy: Lessons & Limitations

Across the globe inspiring struggles demand not merely regime change, not only concessions from the ruling class, but the inherent right to govern themselves, their communities, and their everyday lives. From the early leading light of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, through radical municipalist movements emerging across North America, Europe and the Mediterranean, to the revolutionary fight for democratic confederalism for all the peoples of Kurdistan and the wider Middle East, these struggles refuse to accept binaries between the political and the economic, between transforming economic systems and building a direct-democratic and communal form of life. Thus they reveal roads towards a horizon of total libertarian and communist emancipation for everyone and everything, but how can we best learn from them here in the UK, and how can our emerging struggles meaningfully intersect with transnational movements?

To answer these questions we’re joined in FastForward 2018’s opening plenary by friends and comrades from the Kurdish Freedom Movement, ZAD (France), Barcelona en Comú, and Massa Critica (Naples). They’ll each discuss what autonomy means for their particular struggles, and together we’ll explore the lessons to learn, limitations to be overcome, and ways to build a truly transnational autonomist movement defined by the principle of solidarity without limits.