ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the Autonomists sought to counter structural violence against women, within the dialectical cycle of subjective violence the privileging of women's right to consent instead, in the view of former participants, ultimately established a lynch mob-type group mentality and mechanisms of exclusion. It suggests that counterviolence enters a dialectic, and ultimately comes to resemble the structural violence it originally sought to oppose. The social movements of the late 1980s inherited that logic and transformed the threat of visible political fascism into the semi-covert 'triple oppression' of capitalism, sexism, and racism. Slavoj Zizek's analysis builds implicitly on Johan Johan Galtung’s development of the notion of objective violence in 1969, as a 'type of violence built into the social structure'. The men in the Rote Flora did not feel they could be 'feminists', as that would perpetrate further violence towards women by colonising an ideology that in their view only women could truly inhabit.
