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Title: A Commune in Chiapas? Author: Aufheben Date: 2000, 2002 Language: en Topics: Chiapas, EZLN, Zapatistas, Mexico Source: http://libcom.org/library/commune-chiapas-zapatista-mexico][libcom.org]] [[https://www.akpress.org/communeinchiapas.html
hopes onto this âexoticâ struggle against âneo-liberalismâ. We examine
the nature of the Zapatista uprising by moving beyond the bluster of the
EZLN communiqués, on which so many base their analysis.
Not proletarian, yet not entirely peasant, the Zapatistasâ political
ideas are riven with contradictions. We reject the academicsâ argument
of Zapatismoâs centrality as the new revolutionary subject, just as we
reject the assertions of the âultra-leftâ that because the Zapatistas do
not have a communist programme they are simply complicit with capital.
We see the Zapatistas as a moment in the struggle to replace the reified
community of capital with the real human community. Their battle for
land against the rancheros and latifundistas reminds us of capitalâs
(permanent) transitions rather than its apparent permanence.
We have not previously felt moved to comment on the Zapatista uprising,
not because we have had no interest, but because we distrusted the way
in which so many were quick to project their hopes onto this âexoticâ
struggle. Everyone from anarchists to Marxist-Leninists, indigenous
peopleâs freaks to social democrats, primitivists to âThird Worldâ
developmentalists â all seemed able to see what they wanted in the
struggle in Chiapas.
Subcommandante Marcos, the shrewd EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista de Nacional
Liberacion) spokesman, maximised the attractiveness and impact of the
Zapatistas on progressive opinion by maintaining a conscious ambiguity
around their politics. For us, however, his demagogic appeals to
âliberty! justice! democracy!â were something with which we had little
affinity. It was apparent that making sense of the uprising would
require an understanding of what the Indians were doing on the ground,
distinct both from the way their spokespeople chose to portray the
struggle, and from the way in which this representation was taken up to
fulfil the needs of political actors in very different situations.
Two currents have attempted to go beyond the cheerleading for the
Zapatistas to provide a more theoretical grasp of this movement.
âAutonomist Marxismâ, now largely based in academia, has embraced the
Chiapas revolt, seeing it as central to a new recomposition of the world
working class. On the other hand a much more critical response can be
found in a number of âultra leftâ[1] inspired articles. As both
tendencies favour autonomous class struggle and oppose traditional
leftist ideas, why such different conclusions on the rebellion?
On one level we can see it as a matter of a different theoretical
approach. While the autonomists focus on the movement of struggle,
thinking in terms of a generalisation of Zapatismo, the âultra leftâ
look more to the content of Zapatista politics â their programme â the
limits of which they identify in the democratic and nationalist
framework into which the Indiansâ struggle has been projected.[2] At the
same time, while the autonomists wish to move with the mood of
solidarity and inspiration the uprising has created, the âultra leftâ
are disturbed by the way that identification with the EZLN is
functioning, which has similarities to the role of anti-imperialist and
Third Worldist ideology in the past. Support for existing struggle can
become an ideological identification which represses criticism. However,
criticism of struggle does not have to lead to an ideological turn
against it.
Our interest in the struggle in Mexico is how it expresses the universal
movement towards the supersession of the capitalist mode of production.
One needs to avoid acting as judge of every manifestation of this
universal movement, dismissing those manifestations which donât measure
up, while at the same time avoiding uncritical prostration before such
expressions. The real movement must always be open, self-critical,
prepared to identify limits to its present practice, and to overcome
them. Here it is understood that communism âis not an ideal to which
reality must accommodate itself.â Our task is to understand, and to be
consciously part of something which already truly exists â the real
movement that seeks to abolish the existing conditions.
In past issues of Aufheben we have examined the retreat by the
international bourgeoisie from the use of social democracy as a form of
mediating class struggle, and asked whether it may reappear from future
class struggle. So far we have focused our attention on Europe and North
America. The retreat from social democracy is not confined to these
areas, however. Class struggle in Mexico has been distorted for decades
by a particularly durable strain of social democracy, personified by the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the Party of the Institutional
Revolution (PRI).
Social democracy is everywhere in retreat in Mexico. But the recent
nine-month strike by students of the Autonomous University of Mexico
(UNAM) over tuition fees and the electricity workersâ successful
campaign against privatisation of the power grid are both indications of
a new climate of resistance to the waves of economic rationalisation.
Marching together in Mexico City demanding the release of political
prisoners, they have formulated the beginnings of an alternative to
so-called âneoliberalismâ[3] â an alternative, it must be said, that as
yet appears unable to move beyond the crushing weight of social
democracy that is the heritage of the Mexican working class.
If anything in the recent history of class struggle in this gigantic
country is able to look practically beyond social democracy, to the
possibility of the constitution of human community over the reified
community of capital, it is the struggle of the Zapatista Indians of
Chiapas.
situation is the Chiapas website,at www.eco.utexas.edu . The Irish
Mexico support group,which has a continuous presence in the Zapatista
village of Diez de abril,also has an excellent website.We would
encourage any readers who have the time and the money to visit Chiapas
themselves.Chiapaslink have made several trips and can give good
advice;they can be contacted at PO Box 79,82 Colston street,Bristol BS1
5BB,UK.
The Zapatistas first came to the attention of Mexico, and the world,
when they occupied the Chiapan towns of San Cristobal de las Casas, Las
Margaritas, Altamirano and Ocosingo on January 1^(st) 1994, the day the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was due to begin operation.
After destroying civil records and reading out their proclamation of
revolt from the balcony of the Town Hall, the EZLN laid siege to the
nearby military base of Rancho Nuevo, capturing weapons and releasing
prisoners from the regionâs jails. The Mexican army responded savagely.
The Zapatista army was dislodged relatively easily from the towns
(although there was quite a fight in Ocosingo) and air force bombers
followed the retreating indigenous soldiers back into the highlands, Los
Altos. January 10^(th) saw a half-million strong demonstration for peace
in Mexico City.
Within days the President, Carlos Salinas, unnerved by the sympathetic
attention the Indians were receiving and the jitters of the stock
market, which had lost 6.2% of its value since the uprising had begun,
called a halt to the bombings and summary executions. February and March
saw peace negotiations take place in San Cristobal, at which time the
popular image of the rebel Indian dressed in black, wearing a ski-mask
and toting a gun became an archetype. This period also saw the beginning
of the Mexican mediaâs love affair with Subcommandante Marcos, the
apparent spokesman of the EZLN.
Despite visible headway, the differences between the ladino (European
blood) politicians and the indigenous peasant were irreconcilable. The
PRI wished to limit the negotiations, and therefore the uprising itself,
to the status of a âlocal difficulty.â The Indians wanted to intervene
politically on a much broader scale. Once the negotiations had ended,
the EZLN representatives took the proposals back to the village
assemblies of the Zapatista heartlands where, after three months of
discussion, they were massively rejected. A return to war, however, was
little more than suicide.
To overcome this bind, the Zapatistas decided to call a National
Democratic Convention (CND) in their jungle base of the Lacandon. Coming
weeks before the Presidential election, which is held every six years in
Mexico, the CND would be an opportunity to bring all the anti-PRI
elements of âcivil societyâ together to discuss strategy. But if the
Convention was a success in terms of the numbers attending, and
therefore a timely morale-booster for the besieged Indians, nothing
concrete came of it. Defined only by their hatred of the PRI, these
disparate groups could agree on nothing: the inspiration they took from
the struggle of the Indians did not translate into a common political
project.[4] With the routine re-election of the PRI candidate, Ernesto
Zedillo, later that month, the EZLN went into crisis and stayed quiet at
the national level for a number of months.
Throughout 1994â95 though, the Indians of eastern Chiapas were seizing
more and more land (over 1,500 properties representing more than 90,000
hectares were taken in the period up to June 1995), evicting landowners
and organising their new villages into autonomous municipalities.
Protected from the violence of the landownerâs private armies, the
Guardias Blancas (White Guards) and other assorted goons by the implied
threat of EZLN guns, these municipalities, of which there are currently
thirty-two, were growing ever larger and threatened to encroach upon the
vital oil fields of north-east Chiapas. Meanwhile the army tightened its
cordon, building new roads and bases.
December 1994 saw the EZLN break through the blockade and surround the
Mexican army, before disappearing into the countryside. In Mexico City,
investment flooded out of the stock market after Zedillo was forced to
devalue the peso dramatically, an action as traditional for the PRI as
their routine polling victories. In February 1995 the army launched a
new offensive with much destruction of villages and crops.
Demonstrations were immediate in Mexico City. Now the slogan was not
âPeace in Chiapasâ but âWe are all Zapatistasâ. Once again the army
quickly called off their bludgeoning.
Later that year new peace talks began in the Zapatista town of San
Andres Larrainzar. The PRI would discuss only indigenous issues, and
refused to countenance any Zapatista criticism of Mexicoâs new
neoliberal economics. Although an Accord on Indigenous Rights and
Cultures was signed, which the Zapatistas still view as a great victory,
the PRI has since refused to implement it anywhere. This Accord was
intended to be the first of five, but it was by now clear that the PRI
were using the peace talks to buy time in which to further militarise
eastern Chiapas. The EZLN cancelled the discussions.
July 1996, with the peace process still ostensibly going forward, saw
the âFirst Intercontinental Gathering for Humanity and against
Neoliberalismâ (Encuentro). Four thousand delegates from many different
countries attended this inaugural conference in the Lacandon jungle. Two
have been held since, in Spain and Brazil. Summer â96 also saw the
appearance of a new guerilla group, the Ejercito Popular Revolucionario
(EPR) which attacked the army in its home state of Guerrero. The EZLN
refused to develop links with the EPR, accusing them of reproducing a
particular type of vanguard model of armed struggle which is sometimes
called foquismo in Latin America. The last couple of years has, however,
seen a split in the EPR, from which the EPR-I (EPR-Indigenous) has
emerged. This group has based itself on the Zapatista model and some
links have been developed with the EZLN. However, recently the structure
of the EPR-I has been affected by the capture and imprisonment of some
of its leaders by the state.
Unable to reach any accommodation with the PRI yet unable to restart
their war, the EZLN continue to find themselves at an impasse. The
creation of the FZLN (Frente Zapatista de Nacional Liberacion) during
1996 was an attempt to provide a political forum outside Chiapas for
âcivil societyâ. Set up by the Zapatistas, they themselves have refused
to join, claiming that they might dominate proceedings. Subsequently the
FZLN has been riven by the ideological ambitions of the Mexico City
left, and is commonly considered a failure.
Since then the Zapatistas have fallen back upon nationwide publicity
drives. These have the dual role of keeping their struggle and the
militarisation of eastern Chiapas in the public eye, while
simultaneously building solidarity networks as they reach out across
Mexico. September 1997 saw 1,111 Zapatistas, one from each autonomous
village, march from Chiapas to Mexico City, picking up supporters along
the way. March 1999 saw La Consulta: 5000 male and female Zapatistas
visited every municipality in Mexico in order to hold a ballot on
indigenous rights and the military build-up in Chiapas.
Despite the blockade, the Mexican army is unable to break the power of
the autonomous municipalities. This is partly because the measures
needed to achieve this would result in eastern Chiapas becoming a
charnel house, and the PRI has been unwilling to court that sort of
international attention. The army for their part are reluctant. The
generals know their troops come largely from Mexicoâs urban slums and
have no real quarrel with the Zapatistas. A prolonged and vicious attack
could quickly bring insubordination and mutiny into the picture. Indeed,
according to one officer who has since fled to the US, around a hundred
Mexican soldiers deserted in the opening weeks of the Chiapas war.
Instead, the army have taken to training paramilitaries, for which they
afterwards claim no responsibility. The group Mascara Rojo (Red Mask)
carried out the Acteal massacre of December 1997, the single worst
atrocity yet in this struggle, in which 45 EZLN sympathisers, including
women and children, were gunned down. Naturally the PRI then use such
moments to justify sending yet more troops into the area â in order to
âcontrol the paramilitariesâ. Even so, the army has occasionally been
let off the leash: April to June 1998 saw attacks on the autonomous
municipalities of Flores Magon, Tierra y Libertad and San Juan de
Libertad. As a result of these and other incursions, the number of
refugees in Chiapas is now over 20,000.
1999 saw better prospects. In September hundreds of UNAM strikers
travelled to Chiapas for meetings with the EZ. Desperate to stop the two
sides meeting, the army and police pulled out all the stops on the dirt
roads leading to the autonomous communities, though a few got through.
The UNAM occupation in Mexico City was smashed by an enormous dawn raid
in February 2000 and hundreds of students incarcerated on ludicrous
terrorism charges. The UNAM strike, the largest student movement since
1968, could have all sorts of effects on Mexicoâs class struggle. No
doubt some students will be recuperated by the state but further
contestation seems inevitable for many. The independent electricity
workers union has also sent delegations to eastern Chiapas. In their
fight against privatisation of the electricity grid they have formed a
National Forum which has been joined by over two hundred independent
union sections and other social organisations. The electristas appear to
have won their battle, though the threat has been lifted partly because
privatisation remains unpopular and 2000 is an election year.
Rationalisation in the electricity industry could easily be resurrected
by the bourgeoisie in 2001 or 2002. The soil in which these struggles
are rooted is still fertile. As the Zapatista supporters in San
Cristobal say âNobody in Mexico knows what will happen next.â
The present article is an attempt to analyse the nature of the Zapatista
uprising by moving beyond the bluster of the EZLN communiques, on which
so many base their analysis of the EZLN. First however, we must examine
the roots of the modern state â the Mexican Revolution.
The Revolution is the touchstone of Mexican politics. The period saw the
Mexican state begin its transformation from an oligarchical-landownersâ
government to the one-party corporatist model which survived for so
long. The Revolution is also crucial to understanding the peculiar
social base from which the Mexican state is constructed, with its formal
recuperation of worker and peasant organisations, and its need to
regularly embark upon sprees of revolutionary rhetoric. The revolution
was driven forward by the peasantsâ attack on the latifundias, or large
estates, the dominant mode of accumulation in Mexico at the time.
Despite subsequent industrialization, the latifundias have persisted â
even grown â and have remained a locus of class struggle ever since,
most recently in Chiapas. To grasp the importance of land struggles in
Mexico we need to understand how the latifundias operate, and how they
plug into the cycles of national accumulation.[5]
The Porfiriato, the administration of Porfirio Diaz, ruled Mexico from
1876 to 1910. Its social base was the latifundistas, the large
landowners, and it was their class interests that were transmitted
through the government. The rapid industrialisation that Mexico was
undergoing at the turn of the twentieth century was confined to tiny
areas of the country, and the industrial bourgeoisie as a class were too
weak to make much political headway in the Porfiriato. The large estates
originated from the fallout of the Reform War, which had ended in 1867.
The victorious Liberal wing of the oligarchy intended to create a
limited system of small landholdings that would be constructed mainly
from confiscated Church property and the expropriated communal land of
Indians. But almost as soon as these smallholdings came into existence
they were aggressively acquired by a new breed of landowner (the
latifundista), the smallholder generally being unable to exist solely on
his land. These smallholders became either poorly-paid day-labourers
(i.e. seasonally employed) or debt-peons, little more than slaves. In
the southern and central areas of Mexico, the latifundistas further
expanded their property by violently evicting peasants (campesinos) from
their ejidos (communal production units). This process produced
continual class conflict in the countryside. The expansion of the
latifundia property-form penetrated the countryside only to the extent
that the local populace could be suppressed. Faced with widespread
resistance, the landowners organised the Guardias Blancas (White Guards,
usually campesinos-turned-bandit, in turn recruited back to the Side of
Order). The fact that these brutal paramilitary groups have been a
constant part of rural life ever since indicates that the peasants have
never admitted defeat in the land war, and the landowners know it.
The latifundias, which were usually centred on a lavish, European-style
hacienda, were the wellspring of surplus extraction in the economy.
Sugar, coffee, cotton, India rubber: exported abroad, as well as serving
the needs of the internal market, these were the sources of wealth for
the landowning classes. And if the international trade cycle contracted,
the latifundia could easily withdraw into limited, or even subsistence,
production. The cost of the reproduction of labour fell always on the
villages outside the property and never on the hacienda. While the
elasticity of this form of accumulation accounts for its longevity, it
was in many ways backward. The commodification of labour-power and money
relations had spread to an extent throughout the agricultural sector,
but were by no means universal. On many haciendas the landowners paid
their workers in produce, or forced them to purchase from an employerâs
shop. Via this payment in kind campesinos usually ended up in debt,
which tended to rise at a greater rate than the peasant was able to pay
it off. As a result of this dependency, the campesino became a peon,
tied forever to the hacienda. The fact that debts were passed on from
father to son only helped to preserve this distorted form of value
extraction. If a campesino attempted to escape, the Guardias Blancas
would follow.
By 1911, revolt was breaking out in the north and centre of Mexico,
triggered by the corruption of the Porfiriato and the violence of the
landowners. In the countryside, the peasant uprising took the form of
land seizures. It is the scale of the attack on the latifundias that is
the defining characteristic of the Mexican Revolution. With the absence
of fully-developed wage-relations, exploitation was more immediate: the
campesinos were able to personally identify their class enemies and
exact violent revenge. The Zapatista movement was the highpoint of these
years. The campesinos of Morelos and Puebla constructed not only a
revolutionary army, they also produced, in the Ayala Plan, a coherent
political programme that asserted their needs against those of capital.
The Ayala Plan spelled out in detail the Zapatista programme of land
redistribution: broadly, expropriation of private land for public
utility, dispossessed individuals and communities, with a guarantee of
protection for small landholdings. The Plan was both a codification of
what was already happening and a fillip to further land takeovers.
Landlords, Mexican and foreign, were fleeing in their thousands.
With the landowners chased out of Morelos, the Zapatistas attempted to
place limits on the future possibility of petty-bourgeois accumulation.
One example is the proposal for agricultural banks, a confused attempt,
but an attempt nevertheless, to temper the power of money in favour of
social needs. Of course, had the land redistribution project been
allowed to thrive with the continuation of money relations as a whole, a
new generation of landowners would eventually have developed from the
ranks of the revolutionary peasants. In the Ayala Plan we find a
communist tendency towards communal land; at the same time a very
uncommunist tolerance of small farmers, perfectly in keeping with what
Teodor Shanin calls the âdifferent worldâ of the peasantry,[6] and which
we shall examine later.
If the Zapatistas had, at least in the short term, resolved the
contradiction of their class position by favouring the communal over the
incipient bourgeois, in shared land rather than private property, they
were unable to resolve a further contradiction, and one which led
ultimately to the smashing of their stronghold, the Morelos Commune, by
the reconstituted power of the state. While the revolutionary campesino
was (almost literally) everywhere, they were unable as a class to move
beyond their localist perspective. The Ayala Plan was the most
sophisticated attempt to intervene on a national level â yet it talked
about the land and nothing else. Unlike the revolutionary proletariat,
separated forever from the means of production, they did not see the
need to transcend their class, and with it all classes. The
revolutionary working class needs to talk about everything in its
attempts to generalise its struggles; the peasantry believes it needs
only to talk about the land. The campesinos of this period had struggled
around their needs, had largely succeeded, and now found themselves
unable to develop further.
The revolutionary peasants who in December 1914 occupied Mexico City
were undoubtedly one of the highest expressions of class struggle in the
world at that time. The workers of Europe were drowning in their own
blood and the Russian Revolution was still three years away. By
contrast, the whole of Mexico was at the peasantsâ feet. The national
power of the bourgeoisie was smashed and its survivors had retreated to
the eastern port of Veracruz. Yet it was at precisely this moment that
the traditional peasant deference, which is rooted in the contradictory
nature of peasant existence and the cultural baggage that accompanies
it, asserted itself. Refusing a political solution from within
themselves, and trusting that military strength alone would prevail,
they inadvertently left the door open to a weak but reconstituting state
power. This inability to find a wider social perspective is at least
something the present day Zapatistas, with all their limitations, have
been obliged to overcome, while many of their campesino brothers and
sisters in the west of Chiapas are still unable to make the jump from
atomised deference to communal organisation.
The preamble to the Ayala Plan had ruled out any compromises with the
bourgeois leader Madero and other âdictatorial associates.â Yet the
Zapatistas were chronically unable to see beyond their own backyard.
This blindness to the threat of the state was the highest contradiction
of the exemplary peasant movement of the Mexican Revolution.
Individually, many miners, railwaymen and textile workers joined the
peasant Northern Division, which had entered into a de facto alliance
with the Zapatista Southern Liberation Army. As a class, however, and
despite a huge strike wave in 1906 , they remained quiet until 1915.
The peasant armies which had occupied Mexico City had failed to inspire
working class support, or indeed relate to them in any way. As a result,
in exchange for union concessions from the revolutionary bourgeoisie,
the reformist federation of unions, the Casa del Obrera Mundial (COM)
agreed to form âRed Battalionsâ to fight the Northern Division and the
Zapatisatas. Although this decision did not go unopposed â the
electriciansâ union refused to abide by the pact â the Red Battalions
fought alongside what were known as the Constitutionalist armies
throughout 1915. Yet only a year later the working class was paying the
price for this complicity. The new bourgeoisie, having beaten off the
threat from the peasants, no longer needed the unions. COM headquarters
was stormed by troops and unionists across the country arrested. The
following year, 1916 , the first general strike in Mexican history was
crushed. Despite this, however, the power of the organised working class
remained formidable.
Just like the Revolution, the 1917 Constitution is a vital touchstone in
Mexican life, a document that came into existence as a result of
prolonged struggle, and is still held in high regard today by many
sections of the working class and peasantry. The bourgeoisie clearly
intended the new set of state rules to be a signal that the years of
chaos and civil war were over and a new cycle of accumulation could
begin.
Knowing the erosion of the gains of the Revolution would only be
tolerated to a degree by the peasants and the working class, the new
bourgeoisie institutionalised itself as the revolutionary party-state,
marginalising competing currents within its own class by mobilising
popular opinion. It is the evolution of this party-state that accounts
for the lack of parliamentary democracy in Mexico, and explains the
concentration of power in the hands of one man, the President. Despite
many knocks this specific formation of the bourgeoisie has survived â
just â the twentieth century.
In the advanced capitalist countries, the illusion of alternatives
through democracy is at the centre of the reproduction and expansion of
the capitalist mode of production. Democracy mediates between competing
interests within the ruling class, while at the same time countering
tendencies towards corruption in the relation between state and capital.
In Mexico, there is a hole where this mediation might exist â a hole
that is instead plugged by the extraordinary way in which workersâ and
peasantsâ organisations have been formally co-opted by the state.
It was not until 1931 that labourâs representatives were fully
incorporated into the state. This acceptance of the working class as the
working class, as a potentially antagonistic class who must be brought
into the fold to neutralise their revolutionary impulses, is the basis
of the social democracy the Mexican bourgeoisie utilised for decades.
(As late as 1988, President Salinas could still trumpet the
âindestructible pact between the Revolutionary government and the
working class.â)
With its proximity to, and integration with, US capital, Mexico was
profoundly affected by the Wall Street Crash. By 1934 the bourgeoisie
had comprehensively failed to restore stable class relations for the
accumulation of capital. Exacerbated by the Depression and the militant
recomposition of both the peasantry and the proletariat, revolutionary
change from below was once more on the agenda. If American
capital-in-general was now reluctantly going along with the New Deal,
the solution to the crisis in Mexico had to be far more radical. Most
individual Mexican capitals recognised the objectively higher level of
class struggle. The nightmare of 1914 haunted them more than ever. As
such the Mexican ruling classâs radical solution to the crisis opened up
the possibility of fostering a movement that would not go home when it
was told to, that could develop in its own direction and rupture forever
the fabric of bourgeois society.
This radicalised form of social democracy came through the conduit of
Lazaro Cardenas, President from 1934â40. His first and most important
task was to sign a pact with the new CGOCM (Confederation of Workers and
Peasants). By 1935 half of all Mexicoâs organised workers were in CGOCM
and strikes were going through the roof. Cardenas immediately recognised
the right to strike, poured money into CGOCM patronage and shifted the
sympathy of the stateâs labour relations boards away from the employer
and towards the working class as represented by the unions. In 1936
CGOCM was renamed the CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers) and
recognised as the official national labour movement. The highpoint of
the radical social democratic project came in 1938, with Cardenasâs
nationalisation of the largely US-owned oil industry. Cardenas
manipulated the enthusiasm for this measure to generate a spirit of
ânational unityâ, which he then used to crush the insurgent workersâ
movement.
It was not only the cities the radical party-state had to attend to in
order to prevent social revolution breaking out. The countryside had
ignited and sustained the Revolution, and could do so again. Cardenasâs
solution was a massive redistribution of land the like of which social
democracy in Mexico has not been compelled to repeat. Naturally only the
worst land was parcelled out â the property and interests of the
hacendados left intact. While the Cardenas reforms appeared impressive,
they not only preserved social relations in the rural areas, they
bolstered and expanded commodity relations by creating a new class of
small landowners. For the vast majority a small patch was unsustainable
and seasonal wage-labour unavoidable. The ultimate result of the land
reforms was marginalisation for the many, a new network of small
competitive farming for some, and the consolidation of the lumbering
latifundias.
In fact Cardenas had mobilised the working class in part to discipline
those recalcitrant sections of the bourgeoisie who needed to be saved
from themselves. After 1940 the bourgeoisie as a whole accepted the
necessity of state intervention. Even more crucially, any revolutionary
movement from below could be mediated through the now-reliable CTM or
the new CNC (National Campesino Confederation). As part of the
party-state, these organisations could deliver certain concessions,
defuse proletarian and peasant anger through nationalist channels and
turn a blind eye to repression if it was needed. The state had solved
the crisis it had been mired in since the fall of the Porfiriato, and it
has followed the same model until very recently: one party guaranteeing
social democracy (peace between the officially-recognised antagonistic
classes). Unlike the west, it has not needed the shield of formal
bourgeois democracy to do so.
The American Fordist model of accumulation, whereby increased
productivity pays for higher wages, which in turn boosts demand, could
not be followed in Mexico. The native bourgeoisie was too weak to
innovate and had always relied on America for heavy industrial
investment. The agricultural sector still lagged far behind that of
America. While US capital may not consciously have wanted to keep Mexico
underdeveloped, it saw it generally as fit only for natural resource and
labour-power exploitation.
Mexico did, though, industrialise rapidly after 1940. The model was
state-led capitalism with its own Mexican peculiarities. Investment in
infrastructure was the province of the state. Petroleum, rail and
communications sectors were all under state control, and the state
generally carried out economic development which the private sector
thought too risky. The resources of the state were augmented by huge
foreign investment. Mexico has always been a natural first stop for
Americaâs foreign-bound surplus value; now it flooded over the border as
a result of the post-war boom.
By the 1960s, Mexico had been enjoying its economic âmiracleâ for some
time. GDP had risen on average 6â7% annually. Profit flowed into state
coffers, paying for an unofficial welfare state of sorts. However social
inequality was reaching new extremes. By 1969 the proportion of national
income going to the poorest half of the population was only 15%. In
rural areas, as agricultural mechanisation increased and productive land
was concentrated, the number of un- or underemployed was going up. Some,
seeking to refuse proletarianisation, moved away from the agricultural
heartlands and attempted to chip out a living from barely cultivatable
land â this being the option many Chiapan Indians took; many moved to
the cities to join the reserve army and effectively kept factory and
workshop wages down; some became migrant workers following the harvests
through Morelos, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosi and Veracruz. Still others
crossed the border into the US.[7]
In the towns and cities even the organised industrial proletariat
suffered from low wages. While they were relatively well off compared to
those in small workshops or the unemployed, struggling to survive in any
way that they could, their wages were a fraction of their US
counterpartsâ. Their union organisation militated for higher wages, yet
this was offset by the absolute corruption of the charros (union
bureaucrats), who would often swipe their membersâ dues. More than
anything being in a strong union meant a guarantee of a job, a buttress
against unemployment.
However, for the âpillars of societyâ, those sections of the population
incorporated into the party-state, the costs of the reproduction of
labour were paid, after a fashion â by the âPRI welfare stateâ. It is
difficult to quantify, but the far-reaching web of the PRI guaranteedan
existence for those sections of society it needed to perpetuate itself.
Whether it be official (wage rises) or unofficial (backhanders,
protection or the elimination of a rival), it all had to be paid for.
The corruption of the PRI welfare state has certainly retarded the
efficiency of Mexican industry, prompting many members of the
bourgeoisie to defect to the PAN (National Action Party), the
pro-business Catholic party set up in the 1930s to oppose the Cardenist
reforms.
1958â59 saw a sustained offensive by the proletariat over both wage
levels and the control of union charros.[8] It is difficult to know to
what extent working class self-activity was mediated; certainly the
railwaymenâs, electriciansâ and teachersâ strikes were led by the
Communist Party, and all the ideological drag of Stalinism was present.
Dissident Marxist leaders were also prominent, but presumably their
beliefs were variations on a theme. However, the fact that the Communist
Party was proscribed from 1946 to 1977 meant that following them led to
an immediate challenge to the law of the land: the 1959 movements led
frequently to violent confrontation with the state.
Capital also reacted to 1959. Wary of the working classâs proven power
over the railways, much investment now shifted into air freight and
automobile production to begin a new round of accumulation â and
struggle.
By the late 60s the inability of the PRI to reform and democratise
itself was apparent to many sections of society, and was a major
contributing factor to the student revolt of 1968. These students were
bent on giving cardiac therapy to the cadaver of the Revolution â
determined to rejuvenate the egalitarianism of the 1917 Constitution.
The movement, in its concentrated phase of July â October became
radicalised through its many violent confrontations with the state.
Their numbers were swollen by pissed-off proletarians angry at the
spectacle and expenditure of the imminent Olympic Games. Ten days before
the Games were due to open, around five hundred students were killed and
2,500 wounded in the Tlatelolco massacre. The army attack, which has
been marked every year since by demonstrations, finally blew the lid off
the PRIâs claims to revolutionary legitimacy. It also damaged the
party-state in more concrete ways: traditionally unconcerned about using
clubs and bullets against workers and peasants, the PRI now found itself
shooting down middle class students â its the natural constituency for
reproduction.
Many students, though, were brought back âwithin budgetâ after a time in
prison. Those who had moved beyond a critique of the PRI to a wider
critique of capitalism were forced out of Mexico City to towns and
cities that carried less personal risk. For those being actively pursued
by the state, this meant disappearing into Mexicoâs vast hinterlands.
There is a direct lineage from the Tlateloloco massacre to the many
guerilla groups that appeared in the rural margins in the early 1970s.
Tainted by the militarist ideology of Che or Mao, these were all smashed
with the help of the CIA by 1975.
And there was a new problem. The economic boom stemming from the
industrialisation process and the PRI employment protection racket,
which had partly offset the traditional role of the reserve army, meant
the nationalised industries were severely overmanned and inefficient,
and run by an entrenched working class accustomed to relatively high
wages.
They say that when America sneezes, Mexico catches a cold. Now mired in
its own crisis of accumulation, America in the early 1970s was taking
Mexico down with it. As capital increasingly freed itself from national
boundaries, transforming itself into highly mobile finance capital,
investment flooded away from the industrial heartlands of both North
America and Mexico to the Pacific Rim economies.
The recession gave the bourgeoisie less scope for conceding the
above-inflation wage rises that had headed off trouble in the past. As a
result the negotiating position of the charros was considerably
weakened. With the ideals â and repression â of the student movement
fresh, the working class, particularly from 1973, began a series of
strikes, go-slows and demonstrations. Just like 1959, their demands were
over wages and the removal of corrupt union leaders: a struggle for
autonomy that raised the possibility of going beyond the trade union
form as such. The movement organised new unions outside the CTM and
formed currents of resistance within it.[9] The fact that the workers
had often to physically fight the charros and their goons, who sometimes
used the tools of disappearance and assassination, meant that the CTM
could easily and visibly be identified as the enemy. While few workers
seem to have used this as an opportunity from which to develop a
critique of wage-labour, there can be no doubt that the mid â70s strike
movement increased both the self-confidence of the Mexican working
class, and the sense of their being an antagonistic class, the
opposition to, and negation of, the bourgeoisie.
The movement reached its height in 1976. The radical electriciansâ
union, who had brought together new unions, urban squatter groups, and
peasant organisations to form the âNational Front of Labour, Peasant and
Popular Insurgencyâ, now called a national strike. The administration
responded by sending the army to occupy every electrical installation in
Mexico. This was only the most visible of the many acts of repression
which pushed the new labour militancy into defeat.
The state also responded with massive social spending. Foreign
investment, however, was flooding out of Mexico. Moreover, state
expenditure on unproductive industries staffed by rebellious workers was
never going to solve the crisis of accumulation. Then an unexpected and
propitious discovery gave the bourgeoisie room to manoeuvre â oil.
As a result of the oil boom, the economy was growing at around 8% by the
end of the 1970s. Not only had the discovery of new petroleum deposits
pulled Mexico out of the recession that had begun in 1973, the growth
and concomitant wage rises had served to head off the snowballing class
struggle.
The oil still in the ground off the Yucatan peninsula and in Chiapas was
used as collateral for huge loans from abroad. Western banks, stuffed
with surplus petrodollars as a result of the OPEC oil price hike eagerly
lent out these vast sums to Mexico and many other âThird Worldâ nations.
The loans were used to cover both the trade and the budget deficits.
The bourgeoisie assumed the price of oil would continue to rise, as it
had done since 1973: the extent of their loans was predicated on future
oil revenue. However, the price of oil dropped sharply after 1979.
Coupled with rising interest rates that pushed the external debt ever
higher, Mexico in 1982 was unable to keep to its scheduled repayments.
By then, the nation owed $92.4 billion, the third largest international
debt after the US and Brazil. In August of that year, Mexico triggered
the international debt crisis by declaring a moratorium on its
repayments. In so doing it brought the international banking system to
the edge of collapse. Western banks were soon refusing loans of any kind
to the whole of Latin America which was consequently plunged into a
decade-long recession.
In a desperate attempt to stem the haemorrhaging of capital, the
then-President Lopez Portillo in almost his final act nationalised the
banks. In so doing he followed firmly in the tradition of PRI economic
nationalists who blame foreign, and especially US, capital of bleeding
their country dry. In fact the bank nationalisation was the last time
the economic nationalist card was be played with any real content.
1982â1992 is sometimes called the Lost Decade in Mexico. The story is a
familiar one: having to go to the IMF for money to keep the economy
afloat, the PRI found themselves obliged to roll the state back from the
arena of capital. This meant bringing the budget deficit under control,
removing state subsidies to industry and agriculture, and lowering wages
in order to stem the runaway inflation which had been fuelled by the oil
mirage. State enterprises were privatised by the fistful, usually
offloaded at below market value to PRI cronies. And 1986 saw Mexico
finally joining GATT after years of protectionism: many companies went
bankrupt as a result.
In December 1987 the Economic Solidarity Pact was signed by
representatives of government, the unions and business. (Many of these
union leaders had come to prominence through the struggles of the
1970s). Restraint in wage demands and price controls on consumer goods
was agreed. The Pact was nothing less than an attempt to preserve the
social fabric so that restructuring could go ahead unfettered. But its
very existence raised the possibility of its being wrecked by a new
proletarian offensive.
Unfortunately the terrain of struggle had changed. While the struggle
for autonomy in the 1970s had ended at the time of the oil boom, capital
was now in a much less expansive position. If the crisis of accumulation
was to be solved restructuring was essential. The offensive anti-charro
struggles of the working class now became purely defensive and economic.
As plants were closed or privatised, workers made redundant or had their
wages lowered, the struggle oriented itself around sectional
bread-and-butter issues, which engendered fragmentation. Better-paid CTM
workers were still relatively protected, and the 1970s generation of
charros were consequently in a much more credible position to mediate
struggle. And if the situation became desperate, there was always the
allure of the US border for the desperate proletarian.
Two moments from the 1980s indicate, however, that overt class
antagonism had not vanished from the Mexican landscape. The first is to
be found in the weeks following the devastation caused by the 1985
Mexico City earthquake. With the government paralysed, the residents of
Mexico Cityâs barrios formed themselves, initially, into rescue and
medical teams, and shortly thereafter into community groups. These
groups both rebuilt houses and prevented the incursions of landlords,
many of whom wished to use the earthquake as an excuse to evict their
tenants and rebuild the neighbourhoods with middle class housing at
middle class prices. From these autonomous working class formations came
a network of self-help groups, groups that make up part of what the
Zapatistas call âcivil societyâ.[10]
A more dissipated, but nevertheless important response to the austerity
programme was the Presidential election of 1988. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a
renegade PRI politician, stood against the PRI â and âwonâ. Soon
afterwards he formed the PRD, now the âofficialâ left opposition in
Mexico. The PRD is very much old school PRI: for state intervention,
increased welfare, a measure of land redistribution, against GATT and
NAFTA. Prior to 1988, the PRI had only to manage electoral fraud on a
gubernatorial level. The Cardenas challenge was so unexpected and so
overwhelming that the party-state panicked and fixed the results in the
crudest possible manner. Mexico City was immediately alive with anti-PRI
demonstrations. The TV screens showing the polling percentages had
simply gone blank for hours, and mountains of votes marked for Cardenas
were found piled on the Distrito Federalâs rubbish tips or floating down
Mexicoâs waterways.
Elections in Mexico often carry such a heavy coercive element that they
can be a world away from the pure bourgeois individuality of elections
in the West. PRIistas are usually present in gangs around the ballot
boxes, and refusal to vote the right way could mean losing a job, having
your child barred from school or simply being given a beaten. Thus a
refusal to vote PRI is not taken lightly, and is much more likely to
occur after discussions and agreement with friends and neighbours. This
need to come together collectively immediately and paradoxically raises
the possibility of a world beyond democracy.
With cheap American commodities just over the border, Mexico is adept at
sucking in goods from abroad, leading to periodic crises in the balance
of payments which have usually been solved by devaluing the peso. The
peso was overvalued in 1994 â but everyone assumed the PRI had
sufficient foreign currency reserves to protect it. In fact these
reserves had fallen from $33bn in February to only $2.5bn in December,
money which had been used to cover the yawning balance of payments
deficit. Such a dramatic erosion also shows just how quickly the
relatively protected Mexican market was opened up by NAFTA. On the
20^(th) of December, the new Zedillo administration announced a one-off
devaluation of 15%. Panicked foreign investors scrambled to get out of
both pesos and Mexico. The PRI used the last of its foreign currency
reserves to bolster the peso, but two days later it was forced to float
the currency on the markets, where it dropped 40% against the dollar.
With the dollar such an important factor in Mexico â companies and the
government generally having their loans denominated in dollars â the
devaluation now meant the debt burden in the economy had risen
massively. International debt default seemed once again to be on the
cards. And what was being called the Tequila Effect could spread â for
Latin America, only recently recovered from the years of international
finance isolation that had resulted from the 1982 default, this would be
nothing short of catastrophic. Despite the isolationists in Washington,
a $50bn rescue package was put together by the US and IMF, specifically
to service short-term debt. In March 1995 the PRI announced an austerity
programme that included a 10% cut in government spending, increased VAT,
fuel and electricity price rises and imposed credit restraints.
Meanwhile, with interest rates soaring at 120%, many businesses and
mortgage-owners were unable to keep up their repayments, despite a new
government subsidy for the middle class. Seven banks collapsed and
needed rescuing by the government. The true cost of this bailout only
became apparent in 1999 â $93bn, nearly 20% of GDP! This debt, which is
accruing 18% yearly interest, and which the PRI has hidden from public
accounts, falls due in 2003. Unless it is restructured soon, the Mexican
capitalist class may find themselves in trouble yet again.
The response of the working class to this austerity package was
determined by the depth of the recession that followed. Unlike 1987, the
CTM refused to sign an economic pact with the government and business.
Consequently there was no official policy of wage restraint during this
crucial time. But the refusal to endorse austerity was hardly in
response to a militant working class movement within the CTM tent.
Rather it was because, their social base undermined by privatisation,
the CTM now found itself in much stiffer competition with independent
unions and was compelled to posture a little more credibly. Neither,
however, were the independent unions arenas of militant anti-austerity.
Shocked by the scale of the 1995 recession â one million out of work,
another four million working less than fifteen hours a week â the
working class was unable to move beyond the fragmentation wrought by the
economy and which the trade union form accepts. Furthermore, the PRIs
targeted anti-poverty programme PRONASOL, which had come into being as a
result of the 1988 election shock, offset some of the very worst effects
of the recession.
Some fantasise that the devaluation was a punitive measure directed at
the working class lest they become overly-inspired by the Chiapas
rebellion; others that Zedillo deliberately elected to expose the
economy to crisis and therefore force a period of capitalist
restructuring. Neither position is tenable: by December 1994 the
Zapatistasâ initial impact had evaporated and the uprising was
militarily contained â indeed the PRI had secured a new incumbent in the
Presidential Palace. And the depth of the recession, which the PRI could
not have forseen, is surely proof that they never intended to engineer
more than an simple adjustment in the balance of payments. Rather what
we see is a crisis of confidence in the Mexican bourgeoisiesâ ability to
manage accumulation on the part of global finance capital.
There is no doubt, however, that the recession has vigorously
restructured sectors of the Mexican economy. The competitive edge that
the devaluation gave to Mexican exports has been sustained. Oil, once
such a key export, now accounts for only 10% of the countryâs export
base. It is this export-led recovery that the capitalist class see as
the fruit of the restructuring that has been taking place since the late
1980s, and which superficially appears to be as a result of NAFTA. For
the working class, real wages have still not reached their
pre-devaluation levels. More wage cuts and job insecurity is on the way
as the privatisation bandwagon judders on and the old social contract is
further destroyed.
The swift economic recovery from 1995 showed how successfully the PRI
had reinvented itself as a party of neoliberal economics. They did not
attempted to spend their way out of trouble, as they have done in the
past. Instead they inflicted the harshest of free market medicines on
the population. By stealing their policies, the PRI seemingly
marginalised the PAN. Two related contradictions now beset the PRI
however. The first was that with the opening up of Mexico to trade
liberalisation, and the subsequent deluge of American commodities, the
PRI could no longer bang the ideological drum of economic nationalism
with any coherence. This may not have been a problem: the Mexican
bourgeoisie have decades of practice at appearing to be masters of their
own fate while having huge sections of their economy subordinated to the
interests of American capital.
The second contradiction was more serious. By so dramatically reducing
the size of the state sector, the party-state inevitably curtailed its
own ability to dispense patronage and do favours.[11] The question for
the PRI became: how successful could it be at maintaining its
traditional network of influence and power, a network born out of a
corrupt and state-led economy, in the face of the new competitiveness
the free market demanded. With the PRI unable to solve this problem, a
problem which undermined their own social base, Mexico could open up to
all sorts of possibilities.
With its mountainous highlands and jungles, Chiapas can feel more a part
of Central America than Mexico. The Distrito Federal of Mexico City,
even San Cristobal, can seem a million miles away: unconnected and
unimportant. Until the 1970s capital accumulation followed a stable and
relatively backward model, necessitated by the geographical
inaccessibility and remoteness of this state, and made viable by the
rich lands. The Revolution barely reached Chiapas, and the latifundias
were never broken up, although an echo can be heard in the
contemporaneous slave revolts in the logging camps of the Lacandon.[12]
Similarly the Cardenas reforms had little effect in the 1930s. Some land
was redistributed, but it was all of poor quality, âso steep the
campesinos had to tie themselves to trees to plough, while the rancheros
continued to hold great swathes in the rolling valleys.â [13]
The pattern of accumulation was, and to a large extent still is, based
on expansive land holdings rather than developing the forces of
production per se. Coffee, bananas and other tropical fruit are grown
for export; cattle-raising is another source of profit for the rural
Chiapan bourgeoisie. Crop-growing requires only seasonal labour-power,
and cattle-rearing generally requires very little at all. Accumulation
in these dominant industries has come not from improving productivity
(though agricultural techniques have obviously improved over the years),
rather it has come from extending the land available on which to grow or
graze cattle. Chiapan landowners have, as a result, a reputation for
being among the most violent in Mexico. Their business has literally
been that of forcing people off fertile land. Because the landowners are
mestizo (mixed blood) or ladino and those they are expropriating are
invariably indigenous, the rural bourgeoisie are deeply racist â an
important point to bear in mind when discussing the validity of some
Zapatista ideas. Through this violent racism, the hacendados and
latifundistas have been able to utterly dominate those Indians that have
been allowed to remain as wage labourers or debt-peons. Whether this is
by forcing employees to buy from the hacienda shop, raping their wives
or daughters, or executing natives who try to organise, racism has
buttressed the power of the landowner and served to nail the price of
labour-power to the floor: it has greased the circuits of accumulation
for decades. Backward Chiapan capital does not even have to worry about
the costs of the reproduction of labour, as these have always been borne
by the family unit in the impoverished local village. Depending on their
size (large-scale agribusiness or medium-sized commercial growers) the
landownerâs capital may flow to the cities to be invested, often in
speculative ventures. A large part of their profits also goes on
conspicuous consumption, the flaunting of which further reinforces the
rural hierarchy.
Their paying off of local caciques is perfectly in character for this
underdeveloped form of accumulation. Caciques are rather like charros in
that they can deliver some of the basic demands of the campesino and
mediate his needs. They are usually older men who are involved in local
commercial activities and have a reputation as fixers, usually with some
access to local state funds. Many are PRIistas, most are corrupt and
violent and all believe they âserve the peopleâ. In fact they serve to
demobilise and suppress rural struggle and are invaluable to the
landowners. Caciquismo itself has often been a focus for struggle, with
predictably unsuccessful results.
The migratory flow of land refugees in Chiapas has been eastwards, as
coffee growers expanded their plantations in the fertile Soconusco
region of the state. In 1954 the landless, particularly Chol Indians,
began arriving in the Lacandon. The trickle soon became a flood: Indians
from Oaxaca made homeless by government dams, from Veracruz, evicted by
Guardias Blancas, mestizo farmers from Guerrero and Michoacan. Much like
the US border, the Lacandon was becoming a safety valve for the poverty
and dispossession agricapitalist expansion was creating. The party-state
saw this, recognised its value, and granted a number of land titles
through government decree in 1957 and 1961. But the stampede into the
Lacandon and consequent deforestation meant there was not enough land to
go around, and what there was quickly became sterile. Those who had
reckoned on avoiding proletarianisation by refusing to go to the cities
now found they had to survive by selling their labour-power wherever
they could and eking out some sort of existence on a tiny patch of
barren land.
By the early â70s, with the migration to the Lacandon unstemmed and
living conditions becoming unbearable, revolt was in the air. In 1972
President Echeverria sought to ease the pressure cooker by officially
redistributing land, believing this would also create a new class of
Indian latifundistas. 645,000 hectares were to be given to sixty-six
Indian heads-of-family;[14] the rest ordered to leave. There was
immediate resistance to the evictions â and an influx of young activists
into the region, Los Altos in particular. Many were students who had
turned to Guevarist or Maoist ideology after their exile from Mexico
City in 1968, now espousing an all-out guerilla war for which they were
little prepared. An example was the Maoist group Linea Proletaria who
sent brigades from Torreon and Monterrey after being invited to Chiapas
by local liberation theology priests such as Bishop Samuel Ruiz.
With this mish-mash of Leninist activity, it is difficult to discover
the autonomous content of the struggle against eviction from the
Lacandon.[15]To muddy the water still further, it is plain that the
vanguardists and the liberation theologists were not in competition for
the hearts and minds of the campesinos, as some have suggested.
Liberation theology, which we shall look at in more detail below, had a
high Marxist component in the mid-1970s: some priests refused sacraments
to those who opposed Linea Proletaria; in turn the Maoists raised the
banner of the indigenous church. Consequently the self-activity of the
campesinos had to pass through two layers of mediation â or one of
highly-integrated opposites â before it could assert itself in any way.
The land pressure was increased yet further in 1978 when Lopez Portillo
announced the creation of the Montes Azul Biosphere â 38,000 hectares in
the heart of the Lacandon. Forty communities and ejidos were removed
from this UN-protected ecosystem. The frequent land occupations by
campesino groups, sometimes led by the CIOAC (Independent Central of
Agricultural Workers and Campesinos, Communist Party dominated and still
influential today), were usually met with military expulsion. In 1980
the army massacred fifty Tojolabal Indians who had occupied a finca
(large farm) forty miles from Comitan. This was the pattern for the
â80s: the army and the police combining with the Guardias Blancas to
suppress land takeovers and murder peasant leaders.
If the 1970s saw an upsurge in class struggle, it also saw the arrival
of new national and international patterns of accumulation. The farmers
and ranchers nowadays sit more or less uncomfortably with the new
industries that wish to exploit Chiapasâs abundant natural wealth, and
which are often diametrically opposed to their interests. New dams were
built in this period to provide electricity for petrochemical plants in
Tabasco and Veracruz: Chiapas is Mexicoâs largest producer of
hydroelectricity, though half of its homes have no power. Dam
construction has provided sporadic employment for some parts of the
indigenous population, while others have had to abandon their villages
to rising flood waters. Further dam construction is planned, much of it
targeted at the Zapatista stronghold of Las Canadas (the Canyons), a
region of Los Altos.
The importance of hydroelectricity pales in comparison with the
discovery of oil, however. The deposits in the north-east of the state
are part of the Gulf of Mexico field that produces 81% of Mexicoâs crude
export. But new deposits have also been found in the east, just north of
the Guatemalan border (the so-called Ocosingo field), bang in the middle
of Zapatista territory. Most of this new oil is not yet being pumped,
but exploratory wells have been drilled both by PEMEX, the national oil
company, and international oil interests. This sort of hit-and-miss
drilling requires a lot of land; consequently the latifundistas and
rancheros come into conflict with the international capital that views
them as backward. A less developed industry, but potentially of great
importance to the region, is biotechnology. Chiapasâs diverse ecosystems
are a paradise for those seeking to launch a new round of accumulation
based on patented genetic technology. Already several companies have
begun bio-prospecting in the state. But this is an exploitation that
will be based on the preservation of the jungles, rather than their
destruction.
We can see a new pattern of accumulation developing in Chiapas.
Previously a backwater of non-innovatory local capital, the region has
now acquired a strategic importance to sections of both national and
international capital. However, the contradiction is not so much between
new modes of accumulation and old, although tensions certainly exist, as
some have argued:[16] a farmer may need to grab more land to keep his
agribusiness growing, but he would surely be more than happy to hand
over a drilling concession for a generous fee. Rather the contradiction
is between a local and international capital that is compelled to make
ever more of Chiapas barren in order to accumulate and international
capital in the form of biotech multinationals who need to preserve the
ecosystem.[17] Oil is predictably winning and the natural resources of
Chiapas are being slowly eroded.
What is important is that for the local rancheros and latifundistas (who
need only relatively small amounts of labour-power), for the oil
companies and biotech corporations, the indigenous population of eastern
Chiapas is now, almost absolutely, surplus to requirements. Those who
were displaced from the west now discover it would be better not to have
existed at all. This absolute neglect is reflected in the levels of
alcoholism in many Indian communities, and the malnutrition and high
infant mortality in the eastern highlands. The Mexican obsession with
death, a cultural inheritance from ancient times and which was given new
themes and images by the introduction of grim Catholic culture, has been
renewed by the Zapatistasâ frequent references to mortality.
The specific causes of the armed uprising of the Chiapan Indians are
easy enough to trace. While the indigenous population had been excluded
from the PRI welfare state, aside from a layer of PRIista caciques, they
had benefited from the subsidies that had traditionally supported
Mexican agriculture. From 1988, these subsidies and protections were
reduced, dismantled or abolished by the new neoliberal PRI. So, for
example, 1989 saw the abolition of INMECAFE, the state agency designed
to purchase and set coffee prices, a crucial crop for the Indian ejidos.
Floated on the world market, the price of coffee fell like a stone.[18]
Wider structural changes also occurred in the name of opening Mexico up
to the free market. 1992 saw the infamous amendment of Article 27 of the
Constitution. Previously sacred truths were being questioned by the PRI:
the amended Article now permitted the sale of communal lands to anyone
who wanted to buy from anyone who could be persuaded (or forced) to
sell. The countryside had been opened up to competition, strengthening
the hand of the finca-owners and international capital. On top of this,
NAFTA, which Salinas saw as his crowning achievement, would soon come
into play. How would the Indiansâ small corn or coffee crops compete
with modern US agribusiness? The answer was that they wouldnât.
In tandem with these factors which pointed to further immiseration, the
campesinos of eastern Chiapas had not experienced a reduction in the
state-sponsored repression that had been directed against them. The sigh
of relief that had accompanied the end of General Castellanosâs
murderous governorship of the state (1982â88) quickly became a groan
when his successor, Patrocinio Gonzalez began jailing peasant leaders
and bumping off journalists The Guardias Blancas were roaming the
countryside with impunity and the new forestry police were shooting at
anyone they caught chopping down trees. Under these extreme
circumstances, traditional independent peasant organisations such as
CIOAC and the Association of Regional Independent Campesinos (ARIC),
which had been set up by Maoists in the â70s were unable to hold their
members. The stable cyclical world of the Indian village was being
consumed by crisis. Colombus Day, October 1992 saw ten thousand
indigenous marching through the streets of San Cristobal. Later they
tore down the statue of local conquistadore Diego de Mazariegos. Many in
the demonstration were already Zapatistas. The Indians of Los Altos, Las
Canadas and La Selva were flooding into the ranks of the EZLN. But where
had the EZ come from? And who exactly was organising it?
The egalitarian nature of indigenous communal life has been widely
overstated. Desperate to dispel the dead weight of Leninism, many have
talked up the importance of Indian tradition. Isolated, impoverished,
long distorted by caciques, by corrupt PRIistas, hotbeds of patriarchy
and alcohol-fuelled domestic violence, the indigenous communal life is
considerably less than perfect. But there is a moment of truth: communal
ejidos are the norm, important decisions are chewed over for hours on
end by everyone, plays and poetry keep the history of resistance alive.
What is new about the Zapatista communities is the energetic manner in
which they have become political and overcome some of the worst aspects
of village tradition. Importantly this has enabled the Zapatistas to
move beyond the crippling localism that has been characteristic of other
peasant struggles.
As we have already explained, one mediation the campesinos have gone
through (and still go through) enroute to becoming Zapatistas, is the
influence of the Catholic church and liberation theology in particular.
Whether critical or celebratory, accounts of the Zapatistas have
generally neglected this reactionary influence on the development of the
class struggle in Chiapas. The extent to which the autonomous
communities are infected with religious sentiment is not always
appreciated. Every village has a church, usually the most skilfully
constructed building in the community, and which is sometimes the only
place for miles that has electricity, while the Zapatistas themselves
invariably live in ill-lit shacks. There is a high interpenetration of
religion and politics: the lay catechist who preaches is often the local
EZLN rep, and Masses have a tendency to dissolve into long political
meetings â or the other way around. It would be fair to say that while
liberation theology has contributed to the combativity of the Chiapan
Indians it has also played its part in retarding the theoretical efforts
of the Zapatista struggle.
The phenomenon has been present in Chiapas in a concentrated form since
at least 1974, when Samuel Ruiz (the âRed Bishopâ, a figure much hated
by the latifundistas and rancheros) organised a âCongress of Indian
Peoplesâ in San Cristobal. Shocked into action by the anger displayed at
the Congress, Ruiz not only stepped up the churchâs militant crusading
in the villages, he also, as we have seen, invited Maoist cadre into the
area. The mid- to late-1970s witnessed a period of co-operation between
the party of the church and the church of the party. In fact the 1970s
saw the highpoint of Catholicismâs flirtation with Marxism. Confronted
with military dictatorships across almost the whole of Latin America,
many Catholics believed, for example that: âThe class struggle is a fact
and neutrality in the question is not possibleâ or âTo participate in
the class struggle...leads to a classless society without owners or
dispossessed, without oppressor and oppressed.â[19]Liberation theology
even had its own Che â the body of Camillo Torres, Colombian
priest-turned-guerilla fighter.
The contradictions abound: believing in a classless society, catechists
are unable to break with a church whose very essence is hierarchy and
authority. (In its turn Rome is keen to keep them on side â in an
excommunicated liberation theology it perceives the possibility of its
own dissolution.) By continually encouraging the revolt of âthe poorâ in
the city and the country, yet unable to break through the miasma of
Catholicism, the liberation theologists actively impede the development
of the conscious category of proletariat, whose realisation and
self-abolition is the only real solution to the impoverishment of their
flock.
By the mid-1980s, with swathes of Latin America undergoing a transition
to democracy, notably in Brazil, the highpoint of radical liberation
theology was over. The Sandinista defeat in 1990 and the end of the
civil war in El Salvador further moderated the influence of Marxism. In
Chiapas, however, with the situation in the highlands deteriorating, the
liberation theologists wielded greater infuence than ever before. As
Jacques Camatte says, âReligion allows a human demonstration against
capital because God is a human product (i.e. something that appears to
exist outside the prevailing mode of production). Thanks to him, man can
still save his being from the evil embrace of capital.â[20] When Marcos
says âWe want liberation â but not the theologyâ, we should not be
fooled. The Zapatistas are as devout a lot as one is ever likely to
meet.
However, it was not just that the Church was acting as a political force
â it was also acting as a conduit for Mexican leftists who could not
otherwise gain access to the Indians of Chiapas. Ruiz found these
leftists useful in the organising work he had committed his diocese to.
In the 1970s, the arrangement was that the priests would handle pastoral
work while the Maoists handled the political organising. This backfired
on him badly in 1980 when Linea Proletaria mounted a coup and replaced
the catechist leaders in the key peasant unions.
It took two years for Ruiz and his priests to regain the initiative. He
turned to another group of leftists to help him â but unbeknown to him
this group was an advance party of the Che Guevara-inspired Fuerzas de
Nacional Liberacion (Forces of National Liberation, FLN). By the time
Linea Proletaria was leaving Chiapas in 1983, the FLN, taking advantage
of its successes in organising with the Church, was upping its activity
significantly. The FLN High Command had secretly visited the canyons,
with a view to developing an army which they already had a name for â
the EZLN. With them came a young captain, Marcos.
From 1991 the FLN made real progress in recruiting beyond its core cadre
of Indian militants. While they had may have followed the foco model of
the Cuba experience, which emphasises the military struggle over the
social, they recognised the need to participate in grassroots
organisations â a lesson they may have learnt from the innovative
left-Maoist aspects of Linea Proletaria. However, they had avoided
falling into a tendency that Linea Proletaria had succumbed to: drifting
away from militant land occupations and battles with employers and
towards co-operation with PRI agencies over credit lines, marketing
facilities and productivity increases. The importance of differentiating
between these strategies became more pronounced as the massive
anti-poverty programme PRONASOL rolled into Chiapas in the early 1990s.
With it rolled some of the old Linea Proletaria cadre, now part of
Salinasâs retinue. An alliance between the PRONASOL government workers
and the Church, now long aware of the FLNs commitment to armed struggle,
aimed to divert the Indiansâ anger into avenues of government
recuperation. But with the economic situation for the Indians now so
desperate, the FLN was able to outflank this move by creating a new
militant body, the ANCIEZ, the Emiliano Zapata Independent National
Peasant Alliance, an embryonic Zapatista army under whose banner the
militant Indians began the work of reorganising their communities. They
even managed to get some PRONASOL funds on the sly for weapons.
All these elements â the FLN, the priests, the communal Indian
traditions, each with their own internal contradictions, were lenses
through which the coming-into-being of the EZLN was focused. The
necessary first step of this militant reorganisation was the suppression
within the communities of anti-Zapatista elements, usually caciques out
to enrich themselves or PRIistas who could act as levers of coercion or
as spies. This process must have developed in quite different ways
according to the prevailing conditions. In some places there was a
blanket conversion to Zapatismo and the villagers could afford to be
relatively open, at least with each other, about their organisation.
Individual PRIistas would be easy to isolate and exclude. Other villages
might have an even mix of Zapatistas and PRIistas, or complete PRI
dominance. In the latter case many rebellious campesinos were simply
forced out and constructed a community elsewhere. Even today when large
chunks of Chiapas are controlled by the EZLN, one can often find a
Zapatista village next to a PRI village, with all the suspicion and
antagonism that that implies. The PRI web is torn but far from brushed
away: the fear of informers means that on the margins of EZLN territory,
clandestinity is still very much the name of the game. The expulsion
where possible of PRIistas opened up a space for the Zapatistas, a space
where a process of rebuilding could begin. Simultaneous to the
clandestine reconstitution of the villages the insurgent army began to
coalesce in the highlands around 1992â93.
Until September 1993, Marcos and the Indian cadres were following orders
from the High Command of the FLN in Mexico City, though he has since
made every effort to hide it. In that month, realizing the FLN units in
other Mexican states were barely existent, let alone able to lead an
armed revolution, he refused their request to send finances out of
Chiapas. It seems to be at this time that the ideological break with the
FLN occurred, though it was not fully confirmed until the failure of the
January 1994 uprising. The Clandestine Committee for Indigenous
Revolution (CCRI) which had been created in January 1993 and which was
made up of veteran Indian cadre now pushed for war. However, on this one
crucial point, the village assemblies found consensus impossible.
According to Womack: â[The] assemblies groaned for consensus for the
armed way, but it would not come... In the Zapatista canyons the
majority ruled...where communities voted for war, the EZLN tolerated no
dissent or pacifism: the minorities had to leave.â[21]
From its FLN origins, then, we know that the army itself could be a
sufficient form for the hierarchical organisation of the struggle. A
political cadre could operate within the army to transmit the line of
the organisation and its leadership to both combatants and
non-combatants. Leninism, as a âhierarchic organisation of ideologyâ
(Debord), does not require an obvious party form; it is enough that a
cadre of militants exist with a leadership â perhaps a hidden leadership
â giving them political direction. We know that the FLN grew in Chiapas
by recruiting and training an Indian cadre who then played a key role in
the Zapatista decision to go to war. But this was not a vanguard
âparachuted in from the outsideâ. Apart from Marcos, and possibly a few
others, it was composed of Indians who joined because it seemed to meet
their needs. Specifically, it unified Indians of different languages and
allowed them to act collectively against their exploiters.
But if the EZLN has at its origin the hierarchy and mediation that is
inherent in the Che Guevara version of Leninism, there is no doubt that
the political certainties that accompanied this model were destroyed
following the failure of January 1994. The rupture that took place
between September 1993 and February 1994 meant the EZLN and the cadre
form was thrown into crisis. On the one hand the EZLN had clearly failed
in their attempt to launch a credible military offensive, and had become
besieged and isolated. Yet on the other hand, the outpouring of public
support for the Zapatistas must have caused the CCRI-GC (General
Command) and the Indian cadres to re-examine their ideas. Out of this
crisis came a commitment to a vague form of left reformism, utilising
ideas such as civil society. Desperate to survive, the EZLN has usually
pitched for the lowest, and least controversial, common denominator in
its organising efforts and communiques â anti-PRI. However, the other
long-term effect of the uprising and its failure has been a high level
of confusion and disorientation. Periodically the organisation has been
able to unite around certain initiatives, such as the Encuentros. Yet
given the extremely difficult conditions they live under, the Zapatistas
have displayed a tremendous level of courage and initiative. It is the
self-activity of the Indians, above all else, that defines this
struggle.
The scale of the uprising is the first thing that strikes the visitor to
eastern Chiapas. There are over 1,100 rebel communities, each with
300â400 people, usually young. These villages, some of which have been
built since 1994, are federated into thirty-two autonomous
municipalities. The civil decision-making process is fluid: local
decisions are made locally, important policy or project decisions made
on a wider, but not always municipal, level. Municipally, delegates from
each village come together in the assembly halls that are almost as
common as churches. These meetings are extremely long-winded by European
standards, sometimes going on for two or three days until something like
consensus is reached. This ability to reach consensus is aided by the
vitality of the traditional decision-making process and which recognises
the pressing demands of life under siege. The remoteness of the Indiansâ
lives from regular wage labour, and the communal nature of farming which
in any case is labour-intensive only seasonally, enables the Zapatistas
to carve out large portions of time for meetings and organising.
The civil level is completed by the five Aguascalientes which are dotted
around Zapatista territory. Named after the original Aguascalientes
(where the CND was held) which was destroyed by the Mexican army in
1995, in turn named after the Aguascalientes Military Convention of
1914, these cultural centres are a conglomeration of schoolhouses,
assembly halls, metalworking shops, sleeping quarters, storage huts,
etc. It is to the Aguascalientes that the Zapatistas come for their most
important political meetings, dances, and endless basketball
tournaments. They have also been used at various times as EZLN barracks.
The EZLN encampments, being obvious targets, are away from the
communities, hidden from the constant overflight of army helicopters or
air force bombers. The local EZLN detachments send representatives to
the various CCRIs, which in turn sends delegates to the CCRI General
Command, which consists of around 70â80 members, and is based in the
Lacandon area surrounding the Aguascalientes of La Realidad.
The hierarchy that exists in the EZ is almost certainly part of the
legacy the FLN has left the Indians. Commandante, Subcommandante, Major,
Captain: the chain of command appears to reproduce that of the stateâs
armed wing perfectly. Naturally, there will have been tendencies within
the CCRI-GC that both ossify and loosen command, but a relaxation could
be more likely in recent years as the EZLN has been militarily quiet
since its initial flurry of activity. With the indigenous war on hold,
work in the communities has taken precedence, and the damage
militarisation can do to a social movement reduced. The EZ, however, is
still the arena where the young wish to prove themselves. Since 1994 a
new generation of combatientes (EZ soldiers) has come of age, and it
would be interesting to know how many have made it into the CCRI-GC â or
whether they now dominate it. Unfortunately this information is not
available to us.
One further aspect that differentiates the EZ from an army of the state,
aside from its relatively informal command structure, is the apparent
absence of both punishment and insubordination. Joining up is not
compulsory, though all seventeen year-old men and women are encouraged
to participate. Many seem to want to join the militias earlier. The
Zapatista army has after all come ultimately from the material needs and
insurrectionary desire of the Chiapan Indians. As such becoming a
combatiente is seen to be not only in an Indianâs self interest, it is
also an escape from agricultural drudgery and early marriage into a
world of excitement and possibility. The EZ may not appear as a burden
to the young, rather to join it could be to embark upon a process of
individual and communal self-expression. If we wish to believe Marcos,
and some may not, it is also a space for limited, but hitherto
unthinkable, sexual experimentation, free from the judgmental gaze of
the village elders.
The relationship of the EZLN to the autonomous communities after 1994
appears to be characterised by the slogans: âCommanding obeyingâ and
âEverything for everyone, nothing for ourselvesâ. The former is really
nothing more than an indigenous take on the practice of recallable
delegates. As such it follows firmly in the traditions of soviets and
workersâ councils â though of course it is double-edged: if the
commanders obey, they also command. The latter slogan is an assurance
that that the EZLN, or the CCRI-GC, will not enrich itself at the
expense of the communities, nor will it transform itself into a new
layer of caciquismo. The villages are not the bases of support for the
guerrilla army, as was the case in neighbouring Guatemala, rather the
EZLN appears to be the base of support for the self-organised village.
Because there are not nearly enough resources to go around, any material
enrichment on the part of the EZ, or sections of the EZ, would instantly
raise suspicions of PRI influence. But in fact the Zapatista army is not
saying âwe will take only that share to which we are entitledâ, they are
saying âwe will take less than our share.â In impoverished eastern
Chiapas this amounts to a little more than posturing. The same obsession
with death we noted earlier also leads into a language of sacrifice.
The dialectic of âcommanding obeyingâ can best be seen at work in the
devising and implementation of the various Revolutionary Laws of the
EZLN. The Laws themselves are mired in leftist bourgeois language â âThe
Rights and Obligations of the Peoples in Struggleâ, âThe Rights and
Obligations of the Revolutionary Armed Forcesâ â and often in reformist
content, such as the Revolutionary Agrarian Law, which we shall look at
later. Once again we see the influence of the structures of
Marxism-Leninism. But they represent also a sophisticated attempt by the
campesinos to begin solving their own problems. The army, being
everywhere, was the only body that could implement their new world with
any degree of consistency.[22] The Laws, devised after endless debate
and discussion, in themselves (i.e. aside from their content) are an
attempt by the Indians to endow their struggle with a sense of
permanence, a way of saying âwe are not going back.â Naturally they are
mediations, but they are at least mediations which have enabled the
Zapatista struggle to move beyond visceral class antagonism into
self-organisation â a coherence not seen in the Mexican countryside
since the days of the Ayala Plan.
Any description of Zapatista organisation must include an account of the
effect of the uprising on the status of indigenous women. Before
Zapatismo the conditions women lived in were dreadful: sexual abuse was
rife through rape or early forced marriage, domestic violence was high,
giving birth to large families ruined a womanâs body and gave them a
heavy responsibility for social reproduction through household chores.
Moreover they were expected to reduce their food intake so that the
husband and children could eat sufficiently, though even this was unable
to staunch the high rates of infant mortality. In short they were
virtual slaves in their own villages.
The uprising has not liberated them, as it has not liberated any other
Indian, from a world of want. What it has done is given them an
opportunity to break beyond the atomisation of the village to form a
developing unity based on the rich variety of their needs. The space for
womenâs organisation has not opened up because of the rebellion, instead
the womenâs demands have been imposed on the men in a collective and
conscious attempt to expand the sphere of their own autonomy. This has
only added to diversity of Zapatismo.
Some have argued that âwomenâs integration into military structures
remains the surest way to defuse the subversive potential of their
choice to break with the past.â[23] We would disagree. The women see
their subversive potential not as women, but as Zapatista women. That
entails expanding their autonomy both within the village (for example,
in co-ops of various kinds) and embarking on a project of solidarity
with the men in the army. They are both against and with the men;
primarily they are for themselves, a project which they see as being
realised in the organic and relatively informal structures of the EZLN.
And in response to the stateâs militarisation of Chiapas they have
expressed themselves through simultaneously taking up arms and
developing their own quasi-military structures. Armed with staffs that
are almost as tall as themselves, they have trained themselves to fight
police incursions into their municipalities, often with babies on their
backs. All this is done with high efficiency and usually masked up,
faces covered with the red palliacates that are a Zapatista emblem.
Aside from taking up arms, perhaps the single most subversive act they
have undertaken is the banning of alcohol, which is used by the Chiapan
landowners and ranchers as an out-and-out weapon of social control.
Alcohol sales on tick tend to cause unpayable debt through the
employerâs shop, and the community in its alienation and powerlessness
turns in on itself through domestic violence. The effect in Indian
communities has been devastating, similar to that experienced on the
reservations of North America. With the landowners gone, the indigenous
women immediately enforced a ban that is universal in Zapatista
territory. Many villages have a tiny one-person jail or secure hut where
the occasional drunkard returning from Ocosingo or Altamirano can be
imprisoned for a night or so. The ban, developed from the immediate
concerns of the women, also forced the men into a new respect which in
turn opened the way for further self-defined projects â for example
organising womenâs marches against state militarisation in the tourist
town of San Cristobal.
The womenâs situation is not developing all one way. Pregnant
combatientes must return to their villages where they may be subject to
isolation, although the father of the child must accompany her; those
who have never left will almost always be illiterate, unable to speak
any Spanish, and continue to bear the burden of childcare. In many
villages women are still excluded from meetings. Nevertheless the
tendency is towards free determination as part of the developing social
whole, towards rebelde mujeres (rebel women) rather than subservient
ones.
Lastly, the military situation in Chiapas demands a brief mention. The
federated Zapatista areas are surrounded and interpenetrated with
hundreds of army checkpoints and bases. The militarisation is immense:
70,000 troops, one third of the entire Mexican army, armed with the best
weapons American anti-narco money can buy. PRI- and landowner-sponsored
paramilitaries, of which there are seven different varieties roam the
countryside, ratcheting up the tension. This patchwork of conflict is
further confused by the waves of refugees that have occasionally been
created by army occupations of Zapatista municipalities, or those with
EZ sympathies who have been expelled from PRI villages. In Chiapas the
armed wing of capital is everywhere visible.
Having described the basic outline of the Zapatista set-up, we shall now
turn to the ideas of the uprising. In attempting to move beyond the
cheerleading or the hostility this social movement has prompted, we
shall deal with, in turn, the ideas of the âultra-leftâ and the academic
autonomists. The âultra-leftâ tend to see the Zapatista as a desperate
guerrilla fighter manipulated by hidden leaders; the academics see the
Indian reasserting his or her labour against predatory global capital.
These views of Zapatismo as a simple, monolithic body can result in the
suppression of contradiction. But the uprising is a living, evolving
thing, within and against capital, and as such is riven with
contradiction. Before we go any further we must examine the specific
class character of the rebel Indian, from where some of these
contradictions arise.
The class position of the Zapatista Indian is, as we shall argue, more
peasant than proletarian. Before substantiating this point, we must step
back briefly and derive an understanding of the nature and function of
the peasantry. Traditional Marxism explains the peasantry with the same
analytical tools it uses to explain class polarisation in urban
societies. It is perfectly suited to the rapid movement and social
change that takes place in cities during industrialisation, but it can
lead some to a simplistic idea of class relations in the countryside,
where many pre-capitalist forms survive and where stability rather than
change can be the defining ethos. Just as capitalism in the cities bases
itself on constantly revolutionising the means of production, some
orthodox Marxists see in the countryside a mirrored process whereby
greater numbers of peasants are excluded from the land, while a much
smaller number manage to transform themselves into professional farmers
with larger landholdings. With this programmatic approach it is easy to
believe in the possibility of stirring up class war within the village
itself. Thus for Lenin it was simply a matter of encouraging the poor
peasants to rebel against the rich peasants. These poor peasants,
increasingly separated from the means of production, would discover
their natural allies in the proletariat, while the affluent peasants
with access to land and market networks would side with the bourgeoisie.
The urban formula of class struggle was simply transposed onto the
countryside.
There is, of course, truth in this analysis. Capitalism, to the extent
to which it can penetrate, and thereby alter, traditional peasant
society, does create class polarisation. But the Soviet experience of
War Communism, NEP and particularly collectivisation, shows not an
increasingly class-ridden and socially volatile peasant community;
instead it shows the high level of internal stability and resistance to
outside influence: not so much an example of poor peasant and political
commissar vs. rich peasant, as rich and poor peasant vs. political
commissar.
The problem with the orthodoxy is that it overestimates the ability of
capital to break down traditional peasant structures. The process of
agricultural revolution may have happened in western Europe and north
America, but in many parts of the world, such as Mexico, the peasant
village has remained stubbornly impervious to capitalist development. So
while agribusiness is characterised by wage-labour and new farming
techniques, peasant production has at its heart unspecialised production
for consumption, family labour, an absence of accounting, etc. In place
of the relentless drive for profit, peasant life is one of isolation and
immutability where births, marriages and the seasons hold more
importance than crop yield or rational business planning.
The political implications of this conservative stability are twofold.
The first is that peasant uprisings are almost always a reaction to an
external crisis which threatens the peace of the village, rather than as
a result of internal class antagonisms. The many crises in the history
of the Mexican campesino has meant this class has been an especially
combative one: the sudden arrival of primitive accumulation (the
Conquest), the genocide by sword and disease, the rule from Spain, the
violent expansion of the latifundias under the Porfiriato are all
examples. The second implication is that within the peasant uprising the
binding aspect of tradition enables small private farmers and those with
communal landholdings (though the difference is not always clear cut:
one can merge into the other at different times of the year or at times
of family change) to live happily together in revolt â the Ayala Plan is
a case in point. The principal point of attack which the orthodoxy
identifies is often the most resistant to change.
What, then, is the nature of the class position of the Zapatista Indian
today? We described earlier the uneven development of capitalism in
Chiapas. The Indians have experience of wage-labour that might include:
working on ranches, seasonal work on a finca (where an employerâs shop
system might operate, or debt-peonage be dominant), or fully-integrated
wage-labour on dam construction, or at the oil operations of the
north-east. All this work is either seasonal or temporary â when it is
over the campesino must return to the village to scratch out a living
from the soil. For men, just about the only form of permanent work is
being employed by the repressive arms of the PRI or the landowners. For
the women, handicrafts (including Zapatista dolls) to sell in the
markets of San Cristobal or outside Mayan ruins is a possible form of
income. This is a strictly peasant activity: their stall is a patch of
ground and the level of poverty offsets any petty-bourgeois trade
content this activity might contain. Overall the Indian women have never
been integrated into the wage-labour system, though they may have some
contact with the commodity economy, and the men have only been partly
and temporarily integrated. They represent a section of the population
which capital has not fully proletarianised because it has no need of
their labour-power. In fact, as we mentioned earlier, it would be better
for capital if these people did not exist at all.
Neither has their limited contact with the wages system been a
definitive experience for the Chiapanecos. On the contrary they have
retreated further into the margins of Mexican geography in their attempt
to preserve their traditional communities. Their productive lives are
determined by the land and the consumption needs of their family and
village; their social lives by the traditions of the village; their
thinking is generally social rather than economic â they are part of the
âdifferent worldâ of the peasant. They have been unable to avoid
wage-labour altogether â its influence has been important to the
Zapatistasâ ability to look beyond their immediate locality. But the
overall class position of the Zapatista, his or her culture and beliefs,
is that of the peasant. We could perhaps best define this class location
as that of a semi-proletarian peasantry. Indeed one could argue that the
uprising itself has, with its obsession for Mayan tradition, reinforced
the peasant aspect over the proletarian.
It is only with this category of semi-proletarian peasant that we can
understand the contradictions at the heart of the individual Zapatista
and the practice of the EZLN itself. Guerrilla fighter or Mayan Indian?
Communal farmer or politico? Both and neither. The âultra-leftâ groups,
mistaking the Zapatistas for proles, condemn them for falling into the
traps of twentieth century working class insurrection. The academics
also mistake them for fully-integrated wage-slaves, and therefore
representative of a new recomposition of labour against âneoliberalismâ.
But the Chiapan Indians are not central to the expansion of capital;
they are extremely marginal to it. Consequently they are not in an
advantageous position to develop a critique of capital. Their only
possibility is to reassert human community over a system that would
rather see them dead.
unsympathetic stance,we wil deal largely here with Behind the Balaclavas
of South-East Mexico by Sylvie Deneuve and Charles Reeve,Ab Irato,Paris
1996 (available from BM Chronos,London WC1N 3XX,ÂŁ1.50).Two other texts
we have in mind are âMexico is not Chiapas,Nor is the Revolt in Chiapas
Only a Mexican Affairâ by Katerina (TPTG) in (Common Sense No.22,Winter
1997);and âUnmasking the Zapatistasâ in Wildcat No.18,Summer 1996.Though
we use the term âultra-leftâ the writers differ; TPTG are more
situationist-influenced,Deneuve and Reeve more council-communists,while
Wildcat (UK â or should it be US â not Wildcat Germany) like to
emphasize theirâhardâ anti-democratic credentials.On the Zapatistas
,Katerinaâs is by far the most poitive of these three.However,TPTGâs
position towards the Zapatistas seems to have hardened, judging by their
recent review of the book version of the Deneuve and Reeve piece. : Mao
and Marcos
Sylvie Deneuve and Charles Reeveâs article âBehind the Balaclavas of
south-east Mexicoâ is without doubt the most hostile reaction to the
Indian uprising in Chiapas. Reacting against the romanticisation of the
Zapatistas, they wish to assert the proletarian aspects of the struggle
over the more important peasant and Indian aspects which we have already
examined. They perceive in the rebellion and the forms it has taken
nothing more than one further example of deadening Leninism grafting its
structures onto autonomous class struggle. Oscillating between contempt
for the Indiansâ traditional subservience and an ungrounded belief in
their immanent ability to launch into an unmediated orbit of pure
revolution, Deneuve and Reeve give a schematic account of how they
believe the class struggle in Chiapas has developed and been derailed.
For them, the strong base assemblies of the Zapatista municipalities
merely serve to protect those leaders who âmust never be seenâ: âthe
Zapatista army is...only one part of The Organisation â it is its
visible part.â
They account for the lack of an obvious Party line and the absence of
Marxist vocabulary in general by arguing that, since the collapse of the
state capitalist bloc, vanguardist organisations have had to revise
their expectations downwards â implying that the forms of Leninism are
intact, hidden, waiting for the historic moment. But the problem Deneuve
and Reeve have is that they are simply in possession of insufficient
information on which to base their analysis. âBehind the Balaclavasâ
consequently talks a great deal about the organisation of politics, or
the politics of organisation, and very little about actual situations in
Chiapas. They themselves admit they have found it difficult to get
concrete information.
As a result, we find just about every aspect of the Indiansâ struggle
misrepresented: the land occupations are not about land, only revenge;
the womensâ struggle is sidelined into the army and has no other
expression; the FZLN dominates civil society outside Chiapas; the EZLN
is made up of âyoung people, marginal, modern, multilingual...their
profile has little to do with the isolated Indian that some imagine.â
And so on and so forth. Deneuve and Reeveâs class analysis is
inadequate, and they supplement it with a sketch of the manner in which
Leninism has in the past manipulated peasant movements. It is really
this refusal to even look for anything new in this struggle that is the
most infuriating aspect of âBehind the Balaclavasâ.
âBehind the Balaclavasâ does, however, point to an important problem
which supporters of the Zapatistas are unable to perceive: the way in
which the EZLN commanders, and Marcos in particular, are mediators,
specialised leaders and negotiators apart from the mass of the rebel
Indians. The question then is: to what extent have these roles been
forced on them by material conditions and the necessity of survival, and
to what extent have they grown from the hierarchical organisational
forms that were imported with the FLN?
Ultimately we cannot give a definitive answer to this. We have already
traced the history of the FLNâs involvement in the highlands of Chiapas.
The role of representation which Leninist formations seek has certainly
been one defining factor in the development of the rebellion. However,
what is crucial, with the Zapatistas, as with other social movements, is
that we cannot simply contrast good movements/class struggles to bad
representations/mediations of those struggles â especially when the
representative forms are generated from within. Such a move would
falsely suggest that the inspiring acts of class struggle â liberation
of prisoners from jail, land occupations, etc. â would have happened
without the mediating and representative forms of the EZLN.[24] In fact,
arguably the Chiapas uprising would not have reached the heights it did
without the vanguardist form it took. This is an expression of the
limits of their particular situation: a more generalized and proletarian
movement, to achieve its goals, could not accept the relations of
mediation and representation that the Indian peasants do.
Yet the legacy of the FLNâs vanguard model has undoubtedly fused with
the rebellious and autonomous energies of the Indians, and this
organisational form itself was thrown into crisis, firstly by the break
with the national FLN, and shortly afterwards by the failure of the
January 1994 uprising. The negative aspects of these forms, for example
the hierarchy of the army, have since contributed to the creation of a
specialised layer of EZLN negotiators. Equally the military situation in
Chiapas has compelled the Indians to talk, not continually, but
occasionally, to the structures of power in order to survive. This
exercise, which both sides know is a charade, is only one side of the
mediation coin: that of simple publicity. In a very real way, the
autonomous municipalities are better protected when they have a high
public profile. The Zapatistas, playing on the natural drama of their
impact and ideas were initially very successful at this. Latterly, and
predictably, they have been less so as other events take centre stage
for the nationâs media. This sort of media use is certainly manipulative
but tactically it has achieved a measure of success. One unfortunate
result is that the media-friendly members of the EZLN have sometimes had
to portray themselves as victims, rather than militants.
The other side of this mediation of the uprising is a genuine need to
communicate with other sections of national and international society
which are engaging in struggle of one sort or another. Wanting a
different society but knowing that they alone cannot create it, the
Zapatistas feel the need to reach beyond the blockade, to exchange ideas
and construct networks of solidarity. While this sometimes uses media
channels, it does not exclude direct communication. That is why we
prefer to emphasise the visits of workersâ and studentsâ delegations,
the solidarity tours of European football teams, and the marches and
Consultas which radiate from the autonomous municipalities, over the
presentational gloss of Marcos.
As for Marcos himself â one of two or three ladinos amongst tens of
thousands of pure blood Indians â he is an expression of the
contradictions within Zapatismo. Needing to communicate at the level of
media following the January 1994 failure, the movement has found itself
the consummate communicator. Possibly Marcosâs position has been
undermined by the failure and subsequently he has undergone a
transformation from FLN political and military leader to EZLN media
darling. As such he has filled an immediate need of the struggle. But it
is the bourgeois press, needing a handle on the story, which has endowed
him with an air of romantic authority. Many anarchists, unthinking as
ever, have played along, and the number of intellectuals and activists
who visit Chiapas ostensibly to research the living conditions but whose
wet dream is to meet Marcos is revealing.
Is the uprising âthe final episode of the slow and peculiar integration
of this peripheral region by Mexican capitalâ as Deneuve and Reeve would
have us believe? The Zapatistas are dirt poor farmers with barely any
resources. Quite how they could have any effect on the forces of
production in Chiapas is difficult to see. In fact, being part of the
âdifferent worldâ of the peasantry, and by refusing to die, they are
obstacles to development, rather than bearers of it. We return to our
central argument: capital may have as its essence self-expanding value
and the consequent proletarianisation of the population, but the
experience of capitalism in the âThird Worldâ is as uneven development.
The idea that capital seeks to develop all areas to a uniform standard
is mechanical: some places, for reasons of geography, climate, class and
social structure can only be exploited to a degree. Unable to always
develop the periphery, capital turns inwards and embarks on a new cycle
of intensive accumulation.
Mexican and latterly international capital has already integrated
Chiapas as productively as it is able: first through the latifundias and
ranches, subsequently through oil. The new irony the âultra-leftâ have
neglected is that the specific and important capital of biotechnology
wishes to retard the development of productive forces in Chiapas.
There are two ways in which we can make sense of the productive forces
argument. The first is that, through the army, the EZ itself has
revolutionised social relations in the villages. Breaking down the
gender barrier, releasing the energy and confidence of the young; its
need for centralised organisation compels previously isolated villages
to communicate and work together. Through its need to impose itself on
the outside world it is certainly a modernising influence. But the EZ is
not connected to land production. The villages and municipalities are
left to do what they will with the occupied lands: the EZ has not
encouraged new crops for market, new seed varieties or irrigation
projects. The ejidos and reclaimed lands are still very much dedicated
to subsistence farming.
But despite their inability to produce a meaningful surplus, and coming
as they do from the âdifferent worldâ of the peasantry, perhaps the
Zapatistas are still a proto-embryonic landowning class through their
tolerance, in the Revolutionary Agrarian Law, of smallholdings? This Law
allows private holdings of up to a hundred hectares of poor quality
land, or fifty of good quality land, which is a fair bit of space. It is
almost identical to the Ayala Plan which was discussed at the beginning
of this article, and many of those same arguments apply.[25] We would of
course like to see the elimination of all small property relations. But
if we are looking for the seeds of the new world in the old, we must
look for the tendencies towards communism. Marx commented on the
agrarian commune: âIts innate dualism allows an alternative: either its
property element will prevail over the collective one, or the latter
over the former. It all depends on the historical environment.â[26] In
the autonomous municipalities of Chiapas private holdings are rare, the
collective prevails.
The ultra-leftistsâ strongest charge against the Zapatistas is that they
are nationalists: the Zapatista project is nothing more than a retreat
from the rigours of the global market into the old certainties of
national social democracy, this time around redeemed by the absence of
the PRI. To facilitate this, the âultra-leftistsâ imply, they are
seeking alliances with sections of the national political class,
manoeuvring themselves into ever more advantageous positions from which
to take power.
This is simply not true. The Zapatistas have never entered into any
formal alliance with any fraction of Mexicoâs political class. They
flirted briefly with the PRD back in 1994, and, as far as we know, they
have not repeated the exercise as a result of their experience. Indeed,
one of the EZs revolutionary laws forbids its members from holding any
sort of public post. Of course laws can be changed. But if the
Zapatistasâ aim is to ally themselves with nationalist sections of the
bourgeoisie they are being uncharacteristically incompetent about it.
It would, however, be foolish to deny the patriotic elements of the
Zapatista struggle. The national anthem is sung in the communities,
though not as often as the Zapatista anthem, and the flag is
occasionally paraded about, all of which makes any self-respecting
revolutionary cringe with embarrassment. The flag is a clue to the
quixotic nature of the Zapatistaâs ânationalism.â The red, white and
green of the Mexican flag are also the colours of the PRI, who have had
until recently the exclusive rights to use it politically. Yet the rebel
Indians are hardly displaying the flag as a sign of support for the
regime that is pointing guns at them. So it must mean something else.
The issue is hardly clarified by the EZâs communiques, which are as
confusing as ever. There we can find statements that speak both of âthe
importance of the patria (homeland)â and of âa world without frontiers
or borders.â As Wildcat say in âUnmasking the Zapatistasâ, this is
called having your cake and eating it.
The answer lies surely in a closer examination of the material
conditions of this struggle. The Zapatistas are, as we noted earlier, to
all intents and purposes one hundred per cent indigenous. Tzeltals,
Tzotzils, Chols, Mams, Zoques and Tojolabals are the composition of the
uprising. Many of the men do not speak Spanish and almost none of the
women do. The Mexican state has neglected or murdered them for decades.
Yet they are communicating with Mexico, people with whom they do not
share a common ancestry.
We need to bear in mind two things. The first is the experience of the
Mexican Revolution. If there is one qualitative and positive difference
between the Zapatistas of then and the Zapatistas of now, it is that the
latter, with their limited experience of wage-labour and the influence
of the FLN, have managed to break away from the myopic localism of
peasant struggle. Their desire to intervene in national life is
preferable to a refusal to look beyond the boundaries of their own home
province or state.
Secondly, the âultra-leftâ articles we are examining were all written
before the EZLN developed their project of the Encuentro, the
international meetings âfor humanity and against neoliberalism.â
Essentially we believe the Zapatistas have transcended their localism
and have developed important tendencies towards internationalism, though
in an important sense, and one which is part of the leftist aspect of
their heritage, they are still retarded by a nationalist perspective.
There have been three Encuentros so far, in Chiapas, Spain and Brazil,
forums where activists and those engaged in struggle gather from around
the world to discuss what is on their minds. By all accounts these
meetings have been confused and confusing: the focus is on networking
and heterogeneity rather than organising and developing a
unity-through-difference. Indeed it could be said in some ways that the
Encuentros mirror the cross-class nature of civil society, which we deal
with below. [27]But the Zapatistas, at first recognising their need for
international solidarity, particularly foreign peace observers to
mitigate the worst offences of the Mexican army, have given birth to a
living, evolving internationalism. This is all the more remarkable given
that many of them have a very shaky grasp of world geography. Where the
Encuentros will go is anybodyâs guess. They may easily fall apart, given
the diverse nature of the participants and the generally abstract nature
of opposition to âneoliberalismâ. But in the future context of an
upsurge in class struggle in Latin America they could have something
valuable to contribute. One influence they certainly have had is on the
âanti-capitalistâ movement.
John Holloway and Eloina Perez (Pluto Press, 1998) is the most
thoroughgoing attempt to develop ideas about he Chiapas uprising in
English and whose arguments we deal chiefly with here.See also Towards
the New Commons:Working class strategies and the Zapatistas by Monty
Neill, with George Caffentzis and Johhny Machete ( and various articles
in recent editions of Capital and Class.In Mexico, the Spanish language
journal Chiapas is an ongoing academic project dedicated to exploring
various aspects of the rebellion.
The Zapatistas have certainly been a great inspiration to some â thanks
to their struggle a section of academia, at least in Mexico City and the
University of Texas, has reproduced and extended itself. Like the
âultra-leftâ groups, the academics have failed to ground their analyses
adequately in the material conditions of Chiapas. The academics,
however, have swung the other way â overpraising the EZLN by seeing in
them a microcosm of resistance to international capital. By betting on
the centrality of Chiapas, they have constructed a bizarre model which
views the Zapatistas as representatives of the international working
class. Against the cynicism of the âultra-leftâ, they are so overjoyed
that something â anything â is happening they have jumped through
theoretical hoops to prove Zapatismo the new revolutionary subject par
excellence. From this they have then extrapolated various ideas of the
EZLN as of potentially universal importance for a twenty-first century
recomposition of labour against capital.
The strangest aspect of their ideas is that while the academics wish to
hold the Zapatistas up as working class militants, they fight shy of
engaging in any analysis of the specific class nature of the uprising.
This is bad enough when it leads to the class position of the Indians
being identified incorrectly. For example, we find arguments that
Zapatismo is ânot a peasant movement ...[but] âa recomposition of the
world of labour...its experience is not that of a relatively isolated
and marginal social group, but belongs fully to these processes of
recomposition and probably represents their highest form of expression
to date.â[28]
Things deteriorate further when John Holloway denies the possibility of
identifying the class position of any social group or individual
anywhere â class becomes a concept without a definition! His position is
that the antagonism between human creativity and alienated work which
runs through every individual cannot ultimately be extended into
identifiable class formations which struggle with each other: âSince
classes are constituted through the antagonism between work and its
alienation, and since this antagonism is constantly changing, it follows
that classes cannot be defined.â
Naturally we agree with Holloway on this existence of the internal
conflict between human creative activity and alienated exploitation,
just as we agree that the reified categories of capital, such as
wage-labour, which are constituted from class struggle, are open to
constant contestation. On one level, capital is reproduced from our own
activity every hour of every day. But at the same time we necessarily
confront these reified categories as objective reality. As Wildcat
(Germany) say, in a good critique of Hollowayâs reasoning âin attempting
to oppose the objectivist, definitional and classificatory concept of
class, [Holloway has thrown] the baby out with the bathwater. If we
reduce the concept of class to a general human contradiction present in
every person between alienation and non-alienation, between creativity
and its subordination to the markets, between humanity and the negation
of humanity, then the class concept loses all meaning.â [29]
Classes do constitute themselves, and the class struggle is fought, not
only internally, but in real concrete situations between identifiable
social groups in streets, offices, factories, the countryside, all the
time. Unfortunately the academics have spent little time examining these
very real characteristics (that would for them be mere âsociologyâ), and
their arguments have a somewhat fantastic feel.
As we have already argued, we do not accept the global centrality of the
struggle in Chiapas, although we do not deny the importance of certain
industries in that region to international capital. We see the
Zapatistas rather as an inspirational moment of class struggle on the
peripheries. In fact it is their geographical remoteness which, through
the relative impossibility of developing an atomised individuality, has
bolstered the communal aspect, and so the revolutionary practice of the
campesinos. However, while we do not agree with the central thesis of
the academics, it is still worth taking a quick look at their treatment
of the most important EZLN ideas.
In rejecting the classical model of guerilla war since the uprising, and
through measures such as the ban on members of the EZLN holding public
posts, the ârefusal to take powerâ, either through Leninist or reformist
means, has been identified as a major contribution to post-cold war
revolutionary practice. The academics see it as a final rejection of the
state, of an end to the conquering of political power in order to impose
one view of the world over all others. But the academics have ignored
one thing: the Zapatistas have taken power â in the areas where they
have been able to. They have forced landlords to flee â and killed some
â torn down their houses, expelled caciques and PRIistas. In the
autonomous municipalities, the power of the PRI is smashed, replaced by
campesino self-activity, protected by campesino guns. If that is not
taking power (or âreabsorbing state powerâ), then what is?
It is true however that the EZLN of today does not wish to storm the
Presidential Palace in Mexico City (which, given its size, is an
impossibility). They do not seek to impose their views on other
struggles, as is clear from their refusal to dominate Encuentros or the
FZLN. But clearly they have a vision of change beyond their corner of
Chiapas. How, then, will this change come about?
The EZLNs answer is through âcivil societyâ, the multitude of small,
often middle class and single-issue groups who exist in opposition to,
and outside the budget of, the PRI. John Ross in Rebellion from the
Roots characterises civil society as âthat unstated coalition of
opposition rank-and-file, urban slum-dwellers, independent campesino
organisations and disaffected union sections, ultra-left students,
liberal intellectuals, peaceniks, beatniks, rockeros, punks, streetgangs
and even a few turncoat PRIistas, all of whose red lights go on at once
whenever there is serious mischief afoot in the land.â We would also add
human rights and environmental groups to the mix.
The point is not that, amongst these groups constantly networking with
each other, the working class elements are encouraged to subsume their
needs to a middle class agenda â on the contrary, they are encouraged to
strengthen their âautonomyâ, just as everyone is. Instead it is that
with heterogeneity being everything in civil society, the working class
organisations are encouraged to view themselves as only one part of the
patchwork. They are both relatively important and relatively
unimportant. Any attempt to impose their needs as a class, or a fraction
of a class, would simply be seen as bad manners and detrimental to the
âcommon struggleâ, which until very recently has been ridding Mexico of
the PRI. In reality it is only the existence of the PRI that has kept
these disparate groups on anything like the same wavelength. And it is
the PRI with their hooks so deep into the labour movement that isolates
and encourages the breakaway unions to seek these cross-class alliances,
which in turn dilute the possibility of real working class
autonomisation. The PRI has been both the bulwark of unity and the
reason for its weakness.
The Zapatistas have pinned their hopes for change on civil society,
though. They talk of opening up democratic spaces for discussion and beg
everyone that âin addition to their own little project they should open
their horizon to a national project linked with what is happening.â The
âopening up of space for discussionâ is understandable, given the
omnipresence of the party-state. But the Zapatistas seem to have spent
hardly a thought on what will happen once that space has been opened.
What will civil society talk about? How will it act? The bottom line is
that these civil society groups have only come into being because of
their âlittle projectâ, which are expressions of their own varied class
interests and locations. To ask these groups to unite is to ask the
impossible. There can be no common autonomisation for civil society as a
genuinely revolutionary subject. There can only be the burying of
working class interests in favour of those of the middle class, or an
imposition by the working class of its rich and varied needs â which in
effect would mean the destruction of civil society. What is
disappointing is that people like John Holloway have supported this idea
of civil society as the engine for revolutionary change when all it
really is is a popular front, and a weak one at that, as the 1994
National Democratic Convention demonstrated. But then it is easy to see
possibility in the EZLN programme.[30] Their remoteness from the towns
and cities of Mexico encourages romanticism, and talking with only the
vaguest of categories and most evocative of words, they really can be
all things to all men. Except of course the men from the PRI.
Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico concludes with Hollowayâs
treatment of the Zapatista concept of dignity. Marxism, he argues, has
developed a number of terms to describe capitalâs domination over the
producers of wealth, but has not developed a corresponding language to
describe the dialectical movement of working class liberation, with the
exception of âself-valorisationâ (itself a not unproblematic reversal of
a central capitalist category). This lack of a positive pole around
which to organise has hampered the development of a conscious movement
against the capitalist mode of production. But with their concept of
âdignityâ the Zapatistas may have filled a gap in the market. By
generalising it, Holloway believes âdignityâ could become a workable
idea around which to organise against the daily indignities of life
under capital.
The problem he tries hard to avoid is the abstract nature of âdignityâ
once it is universalised. By attempting to generalise it, he is
rupturing it from the place where it makes sense â rural Chiapas, where
it acquires such a powerful resonance. There is no doubt that for the
Indians dignidad is a crucial concept â one that has been generated both
naturally and consciously from their struggles against the landowners
and ranchers. It has been endowed with a radical content that has led
the campesinos into becoming Zapatistas, into constructing their
autonomous municipalities, in whose self-activity the negation of
capital resides. But dignity is only so powerful because of the
conditions against which it has rebelled â many of which do not apply to
vast swathes of the worldâs working class.
We would argue that it is impossible to understand the concept of
dignity in Chiapas without understanding the racism the Indians have
been subjected to for decades. As we have already noted, the Zapatista
movement is to all intents and purposes completely indigenous.
Non-Indian campesinos in the state, while often political, have been
unable to achieve a similar militant unity. Capital has accumulated in
eastern Chiapas by exploiting a workforce made docile by venomous
racism. The distorted forms of value extraction known as debt-peonage
have not disappeared from this backward state, nor has the murder of
Indian leaders, the rape of Indian women or the predations of Guardia
Blanca scum. It is against this systematic racism as much as the
hand-to-mouth existence that the Indians are rebelling. And it is why
there is a resonance between the communiques of the EZLN and the
literature of the American civil rights movement.
For the worldwide proletariat, though, racism is not a defining
characteristic, though it is an important one for millions. The defining
condition is rather that of having nothing to sell but oneâs
labour-power. Dignity as the Zapatistas mean it is impossible to
translate to all parts of the world, though those sections of the world
working class who experience virulent racism may get a lot out of it. If
dignity was translated universally, with radical content by a rebellious
proletariat, it could be all too easily recuperable by capital.
Acquistion of new commodities and rights could be turned into a
counterfeit dignity not only negating the impulse to revolt, but turning
it to capitalâs advantage â a similar process to that which has happened
in many impoverished black areas in the US.
To be fair to Holloway, he does acknowledge that âthe uprising would be
strengthened if it were made explicit that exploitation is systematic to
the systematic negation of dignity.â But nothing is made explicit in
that part of the Zapatista programme which deals with life beyond the
autonomous municipalities. Those academics who intently study the
language of the uprising do so only because there is so little
consistent content. The amorphous âprogramme for Mexicoâ is either
reformist or naively open to reformist manipulation. The real process is
the reorganisation of the Indiansâ lives and communities. It is
Zapatismoâs revolutionary practice within Chiapas that is the real
inspiration for the rebel against capitalism.
The EZLN has at its heart the confrontation between Indian traditions of
rebellion and self-organisation, the influence of the militant Church,
and the Guevarist-inspired model of guerilla war against the state. This
model, in its most successful phase of the early 1990s, fused with, but
was not overcome by, the Indian tradition. The failure of the January
1994 uprising forced the EZLN to change its ideas and to an extent
challenged its very organisational forms. Out of the crisis came both a
commitment to a gradualist democratic change for Mexico and a deep
confusion as to the future for the autonomous municipalities. The
uprising had however expelled the influence of the PRI and hacendados
from many areas of Los Altos, and the Zapatista villages set about
reclaiming land and reorganising their communities with enthusiasm. It
is likely that a cadre still exists in the highlands, though they are
not separate from, but rather a part of, the communities in struggle.
The cadre role, however informal, along with that of specialised
negotiators and mediators, is part of Zapatismo â roles which would
obviously be overcome in a more radical social movement.
The Zapatistas are on the margins of a highly industrialised nation. Not
proletarian, yet not entirely peasant, their political ideas are riven
with contradictions. We reject the academicsâ argument of Zapatismoâs
centrality as the new revolutionary subject, just as we reject the
assertions of the âultra-leftâ that because the Zapatistas do not have a
communist programme they are simply complicit with capital. However we
are keen not to fall into the orthodox Marxist trap of dismissing this
struggle as an unimportant peasant uprising. The Zapatistas may be
marginal but we cannot deny them their revolutionary subjectivity.
Instead we see the Zapatistas as a moment in the struggle to replace the
reified community of capital with the real human community. Their battle
for land against the rancheros and latifundistas reminds us of aspects
of capitalâs violent stage of primitive accumulation, which, for
billions, still continues â reminds us, in other words, of capitalâs
(permanent) transitions rather than its apparent permanence.
In their exclusion of caciques, PRIistas and alcohol we see a rejection
of the state as it affects them, and in the new confidence of the armed
Indians we see its replacement with self-organisation. A crucial part of
this self-definition is their refusal to lay down their guns, following
in the best tradition of the original Zapatistas, and their refusal to
allow state forces into their areas. By so doing they have avoided the
possibility of recuperation by the PRI â the fate of so many worker,
peasant and student struggles in twentieth century Mexico.
Moreover the racism which has done so much to bond this organised
expression of class struggle has not been transformed into Indian
nationalism, unlike the Black Power movements of 1970s America. Instead
we see communication with Mexico and the rest of the world. The visiting
delegations of striking UNAM students and electristas, the Consulta and
the Encuentros â all are attempts to generalise their experience of
struggle. In these moments of generalisation, in the self-activity of
the autonomous municipalities, we perceive the beginnings of a new world
within the old.
After seventy-one years the PRI has lost the Presidency and with it
national power in Mexico. Despite getting up to all their old tricks in
the run-up to the July 2^(nd) poll â the Michoacan governor was caught
plotting to divert state funds into election bribes, and in the state of
Quintana Roo the PRI were even giving away free washing-machines â and
despite the fact that the much heralded independent Federal Electoral
Institute was controlled by the party-state, Vicente Fox, the leader of
the PAN received 43% of the vote. The shock came in the PRI conceding
defeat so swiftly. This time around, they lacked the political stomach
for arranging the vast fraud needed to switch defeat to victory.
Why did the PRI lose? The simple answer is corruption. After so many
years of institutionalised venality the electorate finally found a
sturdy enough opposition bandwagon upon which to jump. On a broader
level, it is now apparent just how far the PRIâs traditional networks of
power were undermined by the economic restructuring â and particularly
the privatisations â of the 1980s and 90s. Their irony is that, having
propelled Mexico out of its old economic protectionism, they themselves
have not survived the transition. Just as the Porfiriato was compelled
eventually to assault its own social base in the years before the
Revolution, so the PRI through its economic reforms has attacked its
social base â the peasants and the working class. What future now for
the PRI? With command over such large resources they are far from
finished. But the splits were evident from the very first morning of
defeat. There could now be an official divorce between the dinosaur wing
and the technocrats. The dinosaurs, desperate to recapture their
traditional constituency may veer headlong back into old-fashioned
social democracy â an unpalatable alliance with the PRD could be on the
cards. Meanwhile the technocrats, who side naturally with the PAN, will
wish to see their party reinvented along Western lines. A split with the
social democrats would be in their interests, so long as the left-wing
do not take too much of the organisation with them. Alternatively, a
clear split could fail to emerge and the whole party could collapse in
on itself. Whatever happens, it will be messy and protracted.
In Chiapas, the PRI have also lost their hold on the governorship, and
there is a new PRD governor. Will the new PANista President, or the
PRDista governor pull the troops out? It seems unlikely, though there
may be a minor peace initiative. The fact that there has been the
democratic change the EZLN has long called for, but that nothing will
change, may now begin to shake the uncritical attitudes of the
Zapatistas towards the concept of democracy. At the same time, after
nearly seven years of military seige, the communities may wish to grab
any olive branch that is offered them. But even in the unlikely event of
an accommodation with the state, the Chiapan bourgeoisie will never
forgive them.
The PAN victory has set the US bourgeoisie cock-a-hoop, naively
believing that Mexico has voted for a unadulterated regime of
âneoliberalismâ. For us, the Fox triumph raises several questions. How
will the working class, no longer subjected to the ideological weight of
The Revolution, react to the next wave of restructuring? Could campaigns
such as that waged by the electristas grow in size and dynamism in the
future without the hegemonic influence of the PRI? Before the election,
the CTM had boasted of its intention to call a general strike should the
PANista win â a boast which fell away hours after the result was
declared. Already there are signs of a rapprochement with the new
regime. Fox, for his part, will need the union bureaucrats if he is to
forge ahead with the programme of rationalisation. The flashpoint could
well be the energy sector. The international finance markets demand this
bastion of union power be privatised â but any move towards it will be
hugely divisive. Fox will surely need to set up his own version of
PRONASOL to offset the increasing class polarity in Mexican society, and
he will need to do something fast about the debt millstone from the 1995
bank bailout.
For the Mexican proletariat, the battle lines are now much more clearly
drawn.
[1] Here we use the term as a convenient if problematic label for a
political area,an area with which we have an affinity.As we sais in
Aufheben 6 Fnt.2 .36 those who leftists dismiss as âultra-leftâ would
argue that it is simply they are communist and their opponents are
not.However as communism is not a particular interpretation of the world
held by some people,but a real social movement, we will not go down the
path of attaching the approval-label âcommunistâ or ârevolutionaryâ to
the small set of individuals and groups with whom one considers oneself
in close enough theoretical agreement.
[2] For an interesting discussion of the difference between autonomist
and (left-)communist or situationist approaches,see the Introductions to
Technoskeptic and the Bordiga Archive at Antagonism
[3] Opponents of âneo-liberalismâ or âglobalisationâ all too often
identify capitalism with rampant multinationals and US dominated trade
organizations.Tending to complain about the subordination of the
national economy and the undermining of democratic institutions they end
up appealing to the state to tame the economy-failing to recognize those
same democratic states consciously participated in the creation of the
structures of the global economy.Opposing âneo-liberalismâ can easily
lead back to supporting social democracy. Neoliberal ideology itself,as
aggressively expounded by the bourgeois of Britain,America and latterly
Mexico is an expression of the increased global mobility of finance
capital,which was utilized to outflank the class struggles of the 1970âs
and has been used since in capitalâs attempts to avoid areas of working
class strength.
[4] The many reformist elements of the CND were unable to make even a
policy decision to vote for the main left opposition group,the PRD
(Partido Revolucionario Democratico),although many groups and
individuals who attended inevitably did so.
[5] Much of this section has been taken from The Mexican Revolution
(London,1983) by the orthodox Marxist Adolpho Gilly.Gillyâs line is of
course that the working class would have chosen the right side of the
revolution if they had been mature enough to develop a Leninist Party in
1915.But the bookâs strength,apart from its empirical data,is the
emphasis on the uncompromising nature of the peasant war.It is
influential,having been reprinted twenty-seven times in Latin America
since 1971.
[6] For our analysis of the peasantry as a class we have primarily used
The awkward Class by T.Shanin,Oxford University Press,1972,and Community
and Communism in Russia by Jaques Camatte.
[7] Until 1964 the bracero programme allowed Mexicans to enter the US
for seasonal agriculture work.Once there they were invariably treated as
slaves and unwittingly kept the American workerâs wages down.The border
has long served as a safety valve for the discontent of Mexicoâs proles
and peasants,a valve that both US and Mexican bourgeoisies are more than
happy to keep open,whatever their rhetoric.
[8] The best account of this we can find in English is in chapter 20 of
Mexico,Biography of Power by Enrique Krauze (HarperCollins 1998).
[9] For an account of the debateof the 1980s on whether to stay inside
the CTM or form a new organization,from the perspective of day-to-day
struggle,see âLas Costurersaâ (women textile workers) in Midnight Notes
No.9,May 1998.
[10] A good example is neighborhood of Tepito ,as described in âThe uses
of an Earthquakeâ by Harry Cleaver,again in Midnight Notes No.9.
[11] A good example of the way in which privitisation policies have
undermined the PRIâs social base is on the railways.Since the selling
off of the rail network and subsequent redundancies and pay cuts,the
PRI-controlled railworkersâs union has lost more than 70% of its
members.As a result the Charros have found their funds slashed and their
influence eroded.
[12] The âJungleâ novels of B. Traven ,particularly The Rebellion of the
Hanged (Allison and Busby) are excellent for an historical understanding
of Chiapas in this period.
[13] Rebellion from the Roots by John Ross,Common Courage
Press,1995,p.70.This book of left journalism is the best narrative
account of the opening months of the Zapatista struggle in 1994 and
provides a useful background to Mexican politics, especially the
corruption of the PRI.
[14] Accustomed to production for consumption on small plots, these
families suddenly found themselves the legal owners of immense tracts of
land.he government fully expected them to transform themselves into
professional farmers and bastions of private property.The families
however,hitherto members of the âdifferent worldâ of the peasntry were
completely unable to make this qualitative jump.Instead they sold
concessions to logging companies and self-destructed on a diet of TV and
alcohol .
[15] One action that appears completely unmediated took place in San
Andres Larrainzar in 1973,where 22 years later,peace talks between The
EZLN and the PRI would be held:Tzotil Indians attacked the homes of
landowners, threatening to machete them to death unless they abandoned
their farms and ranches-which they did in double quick time.
[16] See for example âChiapas and the Global Restructuring of capitalâ
by Ana Esther Cecana and Andreas Barreda in Zapatista! Reinventing
Revolution in Mexico,eds. John Holloway and Eloina Perez,Pluto
Press,1999.
[17] Farmers and ranchers are being driven into making the environment
relatively barren,in terms of creating a monoculture,oil companies to
make the environment absolutely barren in their destructive quest for
petroleum.
[18] Although not intimately tied-in with the neo-liberal project,1989
also saw the state logging company of COLFALSA impose a total logging
ban in Chiapas,so depriving the Indians of a vital source of
fuel.Naturally tree-cutting continued illegally,but the creation of a
new armed police force to enforce the ban meant another layer of
repression for the indigenous people.
[19] A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Guterriez,1971,is the key text.
[20] Communism and Community in Russia by Jacques Camatte.Of course,out
of context this quote from Camatte sounds too abstract.Every religon
must in fact reflect the material and social relations and thus the
prevailing mode of production (religon is not âGodâ but what you have to
do for God).As such,religions normally discourage opposition to these
prevailing social relations.Of course any religious text or tradition
born in a past mode of production is at odds with capitalism.In order to
remain a religious authority within bourgeoisie society and,in the same
time,retain the Bible and its whole tradition,the Catholic Church
emptied them of their original content.Of course a âfreeâ reading or
interpretation of its tradition can highlight elements that can be used
to justify rebellion-and this reading can have authority above all if
this is backed by some priests.But the contradiction inherent in this
use religon appears when the supporters of the Theology of Liberation
collide with the high authorities within the Church (the main theorist
of the Theology of Liberation, L.Boff, was deprived of his official
powers-âsuspended a divinisâ).
[21] Womack, op cit.,p.43
[22] The Ez as a standing army is relatively small-combatientes are sent
back home once their training and exercises are over,ready to be
mobilized should the need arise.The full fighting strength of the EZ is
probably around 17,000
[23] Deneuve & Reeve, Behind the Balaclavas of South-East Mexico,
discussed in more detail below.
[24] Antagonism, op. cit.
[25] Indeed, when the EZLN entered into peace talks in Febuary 1994 they
demanded not the restitution of Article 27,but the nationwide
implementation of the Ayala Plan,much to the derision of the PRI
[26] Marx cited in Camatte op. cit.
[27] The best account is the âReport from the Second Encounter for
Humanity and against Neo-liberalismâ by Massimo de Angelis in Capital
and Class No.65,though donât bother with the dreadful academic waffle in
the introduction.
[28] âZapatismo: Recomposition of Labour,Radical Democracy and
Revolutionary Projectâ by Luis Lorenzano in Zapatista! Reinventing
Revolution (op. cit.)
[29] Open letter to John Holloway .We would add that it seems that we
are not dealing with a merely theoretical issue here,but one related to
the position of academic Marxist.They are tempted to use âoperaismoâ
(Italian autonomists) ideas of the âsocial factoryâ ,in which all areas
of life become work for capital,to suppress the contradictions of their
middle class role and redefine themselves as working class.But there is
a problem here.There is a contradiction in their desire validate
themselves as intellectual workers while on the other hand wishing to
claim status for the product of this work as a non-alienated
contribution to the movement of labour against capital.Indeed, perhaps
the attraction of Marcos to many of the academic autonomist Marxists is
that he,a fellow left intellectual,seems to be actually doing for the
peasants of South-East Mexico, what they,the academics, claim to be able
to do for the whole of the world working class, i.e. articulate and
communicate the meaning of their struggle.The social division between
mental and manual labour is the basis of class society; it must be
overcome.The university is the supreme expression of this division; it
is the artificial intelligence of the social factory.We are not saying
that nothing useful comes from the academic Marxists,but simply that
their social position affects what they write.
[30] The combination of a pluralist programme which defends
diversity,traditional and quasi-mystical Mayan Indians and the image of
the masked-up guerillas is the reason the UK direct action scene has
found the Zapatista struggle so irresistible.