Abstract

My contribution to this workshop takes the form of questions that have arisen through my experience of working with autonomous (and relatively autonomous), self-organized and co-operative organizations in education and research. Some of these address the reading of Marx’s and Marxists’ work in contemporary activist projects and movements, as this is focus of the workshop. As my practical experience in self-organization and struggles for autonomy inside and outside heteropatriarchal and capitalist institutions has often not focused on the reading of this work, or has focused on the problems of reading this work, some of my questions also relate to issues around the politics of knowledge more generally. Themes considered include hope and political possibility; feminist and anti-oppressive thinking and practice; the role of theory and other things in practicing autonomy and co-operative organization; recovering from professionalized thinking, radical democracy; and negotiations of hanging on and letting go.