Dignity's Revolt
Susan Moore reviews: Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico. Edited by John Holloway and Eloína Peláez. Pluto Press
Fighting neo-liberalism world wide. Struggling to rid Mexico of the suffocating party-state system under the corrupt domination of the Party of Institutional Revolution (PRI). Fighting for justice alongside the indigenous peoples of Chiapas. These banners have been raised and embroidered by the Zapatista army (EZLN).
This collection of essays published by Pluto Press is the first collection to bring together contributions on this movement which brings together contributors from Mexico, the United States and Britain. It is a vital contribution to a debate that should engage not only those interested in Mexican or Latin American politics but in fighting the neo-liberal offensive that crushes and distorts all our lives..
Zapatistas on-line!
Electronic sites which contain Zapatista and Chiapas information can be found as follows:
Archived material:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index2.html
also:
gopher://lanic.utexas.edu/11/la/Mexico/Zapatistas/
MexNews/Mexico Update
Email [email protected]
When the Zapatista army announced their existence to the world on January 1 1994 the reaction from left and right, inside and outside Mexico was stunned silence. The lack of comprehension has hardly lessened as time has gone by despite the fact that it is easy to access their communiqués through the internet.
While the tradition of the guerrilla has deep roots in Latin American society it was immediately apparent that this was no traditional guerrilla army. The dismissal by ladino society of the indigenous communities was challenged by a revolt in the heart of the Lacandon jungle, by a movement that brought together people without a common language and wove them into a people in arms fighting for dignity and justice.
One central myth about the Zapatista rebellion that this book gives a decisive lie to is the idea that this struggle, in so far as one of its focii is the self-emancipation of the indigenous peoples, is a backward looking, utopian and even reactionary process.
The book explains for example that the first revolution the Zapatistas provoked and experienced was among women . Zapatista women were not content to accept the traditional role in their communities and their voices and demands posed uncomfortable challenges for the men. What is particularly refreshing is that Marcos, at least in retrospect, reflects on this conflict as a positive development, without at all papering over the resistance it met.
The rebellion grew out of the reality that conditions in Chiapas today and in 1994 are and were the product of the neo-liberal offensive. Globalisation has sharpened the already acute contradictions that exist not only in the urban centres but in rural communities, among indigenous peoples. It was not accident that the first Zapatista uprising took place at the very moment the North American Free Trade Agreement – the clearest fist of neo-liberalism in the region- came into force.
As the EZLN said :
"We are the product of the encounter between indigenous wisdom and resistance and the rebelliousness and valour of the generation of dignity which lit the dark night of the Sixties, the Seventies and the Eighties with its blood"
It is true however that the Zapatistas pose a challenge to any socialist who has a mechanical view of history, who does not understand that in terms of forms of socialisation, creativity and ideas supposedly primitive societies often have things to teach as well as to learn from westernised, urbanised traditions. Indeed one can feel from the stories here that the traditions of self-organisation in these communities are far closer to the vision of socialist democracy than for example the trade union model which permeates our own British experience
At a seemingly trivial but none the less vital level how can one conceive of a movement that has propagated its ideas so widely through electronic media as backward looking? At a more serious level it can scarcely be argued that slogans around Dignity and Justice are not socialist in their content.
The first revolution the Zapatistas provoked and experienced was among women
After all the Russian Revolution raised the slogans of Bread, Peace and Land – it is the context of slogans as well as the content that gives them their dynamic, progressive, reactionary self-limiting.
The strengths of this book are the strengths of the Zapatistas and its weaknesses likewise. Key concepts of the movement such as " everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves" and "command obeying" require more than a instant dismissal as foreign to our ways of thinking in the revolutionary tradition.
"Command obeying" for example is being articulated in a society where the PRI have been in government for 68 years and wreaked untold devastation on the Mexican peoples during that time.
But they are the Institutionalised Revolutionary Party. They still use the word revolutionary, manipulating and claiming for themselves the legacy of Zapata. It as if they have the divine right of Presidents – after all not so different from the divine right of kings. They certainly do not command respect, do not command obeying.
Similarly one can read "everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves" as a comment on a system where in an incredibly blatant way politicians aspire to power in order to lavishly feather their own nests rather than to enhance the lives of those they supposedly represent. It also has something to say about the legacy of Stalinism where again the bureaucracy became a parasitic leech sucking blood from working people.
But it seems that the balance sheet that the Zapatistas – and the authors of this book – draw from both Mexican and international history is that these problems need to be solved by counterposing living democracy to the dead hand of party organisation, be that parliamentarian or Leninist and by rejecting the idea that they want to take state power or indeed power at all.
Within the book concepts of power are dealt with in a relatively detailed way , especially in Patricia King and Javier Villanueva’s essay ‘Breaking the Blockade’ and in Luis Lorenzano’s ‘Zapatismo: Recomposition of Labour Radical Democracy and Revolutionary Project’.
‘Breaking the Blockade’ argues: " Yet the struggle is not about taking power. The efficacy of one praxis over another is not something which can ‘be taken’ as you might pick up a tool; it must and can only, take shape from the material through which it works. Power in action takes from in the political institutions it creates and shapes to extend its rule.
"Taking power means that a new community takes control of the institutions formerly used by the old community to exercise its power, thus displacing and reducing the old community. A revolutionary community cannot do this because the efficacy of such institutions lies in their capacity to maintain the collectivity of loneliness and eliminate revolutionary communities".
This argument is profoundly frustrating at many levels. It misunderstands the whole point of the Leninist legacy and praxis - that is that in order to take power, revolutionaries have to destroy the bourgeois state for precisely this reason (albeit explained in rather different language) It is not only the legacy of the PRI which blocks dialogue here, but the way that Stalinism has warped the reading of Lenin’s thought.
Our argument exists not only on the level of theory, but with the practice of the Zapatistas too. In so far as they not only spurn the notion of taking power, but of forming a party in the sense they understand it, and certainly of participating in elections they de facto give credence to other political forces which limit struggle and self organisation far more.
The PRD under the leadership of Cardenas was a break with the PRI on an anti-corruption and democratic ticket. But the rupture is very much a partial one - Cardenas’ party in my view remains a bourgeois formation. Initially in practice only, but increasingly going beyond that, the Zapatistas have given legitimacy to this formation on the electoral level – a process which has both limited their own political development and the self organisation of the Mexican peoples.
However while this discussion and praxis is frustrating in the brick walls it builds as well as illuminating in those it bulldozes, the response of thinking socialists cannot be to sit on the perimeter fence and throw stones.
If we are to reach new audiences for our ideas, whether in Chiapas, Mexico or internationally we have to relate to and engage with this movement and run with the challenges it poses.
Join the Mexican Support Group!
The Mexican Support group fights to promote the interests of the people of Mexico and in particular the poorest sectors by increasing awareness in in Britain, promoting self determination of the indigenous peoples and highlighting human rights violations, promoting support for Mexican groups which represent and defend the rights of popular sectors and monitoring transnational companies, particularly British business in the Mexican economy, and British state involvement in Mexico.
Membership is £5 unwaged, £7 low waged and £10 waged; cheques payable to Mexico Support Group.
Send to MSG, Latin American House, Kingsgate Place, London NW6 4TA
Zapatista Action Project
The Zapatista Action Project (ZAP) is a network that includes the Mexico Support Group, For Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, the Greeen Student Network, the Kings Cross Womens Centre and many other groups.
ZAP demands that the European Union suspends its Free Trade Agreement with Mexico until human rights are fully respected there.
We demand that the Mexican Government:
Demilitarises Chiapas, Guerrero and all of Mexico.
Withdraws troops from the Zapaatista areas.
Respects and implements the San Andres Accords on Indigenous Rights.
Dismantles the Death Squads.
Hands of Human Rights Observers!
Contact ZAP c/o BM CRL London WC1N 3X; phone 0181 679 6930
Email chiapaslink@acephale&[email protected]
UK Zapatista Challenge website: http://www.acephale.org/encuentro