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Title: Labelling the Zapatistas
Author: John Holloway
Date: 1998
Language: en
Topics: a reply, Zapatistas
Source: Retrieved on 4th August 2020 from http://struggle.ws/mexico/comment/holloway_reeves_98.html

John Holloway

Labelling the Zapatistas

When I first started to read the paper by Deneuve and Reeve on ‘Behind

the Balaclavas of South-East Mexico’, I confess that I quickly put it

aside as being too silly to take seriously. To criticise the practice of

community decision-making in Chiapas on the basis that the Maya and Inca

societies were authoritarian is just too ridiculous — something like

criticising the IRA on the basis that Genghis Khan was undemocratic (the

distances in time and space are roughly comparable).

Two things led me to read the article more carefully: firstly, the

careful discussion to which it was subjected in the aut-op-sy mailing

list, and secondly, the fact that Wildcat, for whom I have a great

respect, urged me to read it seriously: in the editorial introduction to

no. 45 of Wildcat-Zirkular (June 1998), they say in bold type that

George Caffentzis (who also has an article published in that number) and

I should listen to Reeve and learn something about emancipatory

processes.

With this admonition in mind, I went back to reading the Deneuve-Reeve

article, together with the discussion in the aut-op-sy list, which

included a reply by Reeve (20/4/98) to criticisms made in that

discussion. Having read the discussion, I abandoned my original

intention of replying to Deneuve-Reeve’s criticism of the Zapatistas,

because there are already excellent replies to be found in the aut-op-sy

discussion, especially the contributions by Monty Neill on 29/3/98, by

Christopher Day on the same date and by Monty Neill on 7/5/98.

Nevertheless, I continue to find the Deneuve-Reeve article not only

ill-informed but deeply disturbing. In this note I want to explain why.

Possibly the most important charge that Deneuve-Reeve make against the

Zapatistas is their statement at the beginning of the article that the

Zapatista movement is ‘a movement which is a vehicle for the values of

ethnic identity ... which are nowadays at the heart of the most barbaric

tendencies in the world’. While I agree that identity (and not just

ethnic identity) is at the heart of the most barbaric tendencies of the

world, what disturbs me about the article is that it is Deneuve-Reeve’s

argument, and not the Zapatista movement, which is identitarian.

Identity is the core of bourgeois thought. What distinguishes bourgeois

thought is the assumption that capitalist social relations are

permanent, that they ‘are’. Deprived of historical movement,

interconnected processes appear as so many separate things that ‘are’,

each with its own Is-ness, its own identity. This identity is not, of

course, a matter of mere appearance: the material establishment of

social relations through the exchange of commodities, and the fracturing

of the relation between subject and object which that implies, means

that the flux of social relations (the ‘sheer unrest of life’) really

exists in the form of things, of identities. Bourgeois thought,

scientific and non-scientific alike, proceeds through identifying,

classifying, defining, labelling. The thing or person is abstracted from

the flux of social relations and identified. The argument goes: ‘it is

x, therefore ...’

Identification as a pattern of thought (and action) receives its

clearest expression in fascism, racism and sexism: ‘he is a Jew,

therefore ...; she is black, therefore...; she is a woman, therefore

...; they are long-haired, they are gay, etc ...’ The starting point of

identification precludes any understanding of social change, because all

possible movement is entrapped within the identification on which the

argument is based. Anything can be explained by ‘well, what do you

expect, they’re Jews’, or ‘women are like that’: an eternal return in

which there is nothing new. Over all such arguments stands the grim,

terrible warning of Adorno: ‘Auschwitz confirmed the philospheme of pure

identity as death.’ (Negative Dialectics, 1990, 362).

Identity is the hallmark of bourgeois thought, but it penetrates deep

into would-be oppositional thought as well. The response to Nazi fascism

is often: ‘they are Germans, therefore ...’; or to US domination, ‘they

are Americans, therefore...’ Or it can be a simple inversion: ‘we are

black, therefore ...; we are women, we are Basques, we are Irish, we are

gay...’ In all these cases, as long as the assertion of identity does

not consciously carry with it its own negation (‘we are black, but more,

etc’), then it reproduces precisely the pattern and the danger of

fascist thought. Hence the force of Deneuve-Reeve’s suggestion that

identity is ‘at the heart of the most barbaric tendencies in the world’.

With this, I return to Deneuve-Reeve’s argument. In general, the

Zapatista movement has been strongly and consciously anti-identitarian.

They have consistently refused to present themselves as an ethnic

movement, although some of their symapthisers have tended to represent

them as such. That is also the sense of many of their statements about

being a national movement: ‘we are not an indigenous movement but

national’, etc. Against all the attempts by the state, and by the

established left, to label them, they have refused to fit into any

categories. In one of their communiques, Power says to them: ‘I am who

am, the eternal repetition... Be ye not awkward, refuse not to be

classified. All that cannot be classified counts not, exists not, is

not.’ (La Jornada 10 June 1996) Their response, of course, is mockery,

laughter, jokes, dancing. And to their supporters from all over the

world they say, in the anti-identitarian statement by Ana Maria to the

first Intergalactic: ‘Detras de nosotros estamos ustedes’ (‘Behind us

are the we that are you’).

Deneuve and Reeve, on the other hand, insist on identifying, on

labelling. Their argument is: ‘they are Maoists, therefore...’ Like all

identitarian arguments, it is caught in an ever-returning present: ‘They

were Maoists in the 1970s, they were Maoists when they went to the

jungle in the early 1980s, therefore they’re Maoists now, therefore ...’

And then, in perfect reproduction of the pattern of anti-Jewish

arguments: ‘They claim that their decisions are taken in democratic

assemblies, but then they would, wouldn’t they, Maoists always do.’

In this context, the criticism of the claim of community democracy in

Chiapas by reference to the practices of the Incas (six centuries and

thousands of kilometres away) seems not only ridiculous but sinisterly

logical: ‘The Indians claim to have a democratic tradition, but look at

the Mayas, look at the Aztecs, look at the Incas, that shows what sort

of tradition they have: once an Indian, always an Indian’.

And as for Latin American revolutionaries: ‘nothing new, we’ve seen it

all before — Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador’. And as for the enthusiasts

who support them: ‘why can’t they learn that we live in an eternal

present, that nothing changes?’

That, dear Wildcat, is why I find the Deneuve-Reeve argument not only

ill-informed but deeply disturbing.