"The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America" is grounded in Marxist schools of thought and draws on theories of the mid-20th century German philosopher Ernst Bloch, particularly his understanding of reality as an open process, described in "The Principle of Hope" as the human anthropological impulse to explore what is "not yet". This framework offers a conceptualization of autonomy as a "Figurative politics praxis" entailing four simultaneous modes of negation, creation, contradiction, and excess. These four modes of autonomous praxis are developed in the text in light of the experiences of the Zapatista uprising in 1994, the unemployed worker's movement in Argentina in 2001–2002, the indigenous movements in Bolivia between 2000 and 2005, and landless workers' movements (MST) in Brazil.