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Rejecting male sexism in the primarily youthful white antiwar and new left movements, radical white women left to build their own autonomous movement, feminism. Socialist feminists, like Bread and Roses in Boston, were anticapitalist and antiracist, and hoped to build an interracial movement. They tried to organize working class and women of color but were not successful. Starting from a position of abstract anti-racism, white women learned, primarily from women of color, how race and class shaped gender. While they had originally believed that sisterhood is powerful and that gender is an overriding category, they learned that solidarity between women of different races and classes was not as simple as it appeared.

Chapter 12, “15-M Political Culture, Collective Identity, and the Logic of Autonomous Networks in the Digital Age,” argues that, against all odds, autonomous networking logics can build and sustain strong movements in the absence of formal professionalized organizational structures and strong leadership, and across heterogeneous issues and identities. It explores the synergies and tensions within 15-M political culture, and shows how they act as a corrective to some of the key challenges faced by autonomous movements. Contra “connective action” theses, the chapter shows how collective action logics continue to fuel autonomous networks in the digital age.

Part II traces 15-M from its origins to the end of the occupation of Madrid’s central plaza, the Puerta del Sol. The Introduction to Part II argues for the need to distinguish analytically between the original 15-M protest, the 15-M occupation camps of the squares (or acamapadas), and the 15-M movement that adopted this label following the original protests and occupations. Although the three are closely connected, each have distinct features that shape their emergence and evolution. Distinguishing between them allows us to evaluate claims about spontaneity, newness, and the role of digital media and tools in creating new organizing logics of collective action. It also introduces key aspects of the Spanish asambleario autonomous movement culture that deeply influenced the organizational forms and orientations of the 15-M movement.

This chapter presents the major contributions of the book and the question of the role pro-democracy movements can play in democratic regeneration in times of crisis. It argues that their emancipatory potential lies in critique and resignification of the meaning of democracy, and in prefigurative experimentation in democratic practice. Activists in 15-M developed shared master frames about the crisis, austerity, and democracy that enabled them to not only develop a strong collective identity, but also to effectively contest hegemonic narratives used to justify austerity politics. In this way democracy also became one core factor in enabling cross-sectoral alliances, in both form (movement practices that prefiguratively embodied a “15-M” way of manifesting democratic principles) and in content (diagnoses of deficient democracy and new imaginaries proposed to correct these deficiencies).The chapter evaluates the impact and significance of the 15-M movement, and the potential for autonomous movements to reload democracy in times of crisis.

This chapter illustrates how mechanical or robotic performances can get the same status as human performances. Jasia Reichardt put forward the argument that characteristics of machines are attributed less to their appearance and more to their behavior. This led to a gradual shift in creating machines and robots who can perform autonomous movements. The author discusses the industrial art scenes and machine sound art of the 1990s in Europe and America. The second part of the chapter focuses more on the replacement of human operators with robots that can perform the same gestures. The chapter concludes with the concept of system aesthetics put forward by art historian Jack Burnham in creating autonomous, cybernetic, sculptures and robots that can perform in galleries and theatres without human intervention.

Chapter 4, “Acampada Sol: the Chrysalis and the Crucible,” shows how the camp was a distinct “event” with a specific internal logic, and draws on participant testimonies to transmit the emotional experience of what was a life-changing event for participants. It argues that the camp was a chrysalis, a protected stage of development within which the 15-M movement was born, and a crucible, in that it served as a container into which old and new elements fused together under an exceptional situation of emotional intensity to create something new: a more consolidated ethos and political culture, as well as new sets of social relations that would go on to generate a broad network of interrelated assemblies, collectives, events, and political projects, all organized around a collective identity and a political culture referred to in Spain simply as “15-M.” Due to sustained and intense interaction in space and time, movement camps provide a unique opportunity for building the social capital that can develop from mobilization and sustain movements over time. In its deliberative and experiential experimentation with democracy, the camp engendered an emerging imaginary that coupled reform of democratic forms (in social, economic, and political institutions) with substantive content that drew on the key ideational frameworks of the movement traditions present in the square.

This chapter organizes the discussion presented here in terms of Riesman's model as a way of withdrawing the figure from a teleological perspective. It notes that Riesman recognizes the weakness of the radar type for dangerous collective enthusiasms, but in his construction the possibilities for autonomous movement do not rely on the model of inner-direction; rather Riesman dares to consider the other-direction and personal autonomy as of a piece, without resorting to the figure of the armored subject. It clarifies that the autonomy of the radar type is never an all-or-nothing affair, but the result of a largely imperceptible struggle with varieties of conformity. It notes that autonomy of this sort never produces heroes.

During 2013, there was little French media interest in the Scottish referendum, though by 2014 some coverage was evident in both press and broadcast output, though interest still appeared low. Coverage spiked after the publication of a Yes lead poll in early September 2014, from about 7 September until 19 September, a few days after the vote. But the general lesson from France was that while French regional nationalists in the Basque country, in Brittany, and Corsica, reacted supportively over the referendum, as did the equivalent of the French Green Party, Europe Écologie Les Verts, the great majority of French politicians were dismissive of claims for Scottish independence. There was a tendency to see such claims as selfish or anti-European, while support for the Union (the UK) was frequent. The overall sense was that France did not really engage with the Scottish referendum.