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Title: Unmasking the Zapatistas
Author: Wildcat
Date: Summer 1996
Language: en
Topics: Zapatistas, critique
Source: Retrieved on 4th August 2020 from http://struggle.ws/mexico/comment/antizap_wildcat.html
Notes: From Wildcat #18

Wildcat

Unmasking the Zapatistas

“Today, we repeat: OUR STRUGGLE IS NATIONAL”

(EZLN, Third Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, January 1995).

Given its identification with the project of reforming the Mexican

nation, why did anyone think the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National

Liberation) might be something more? The answer is what it has done. The

EZLN liberated prisoners, attacked police stations, burned down town

halls, and has thrown out some of the big landholders. Many of its

demands for material improvements in living conditions are fair enough.

It claims to combine clandestinity with participatory decision making,

which we assumed were incompatible. If they really do carry on

discussions until they all agree, as they have told journalists, this

must be the first time in history an army has organised on the basis of

consensus. Their claim to have almost abolished sexism and homophobia

within their ranks is also difficult to believe, but according to what

Amor y Rabia supporters actually saw in May 94, it is basically true,

and we cannot contradict their account.

But if their organisation is remarkably close to the latest anarchist

fashion, their aims are far from revolutionary, and their analysis

banal. The Mexican electoral system is less than perfectly democratic.

The population of Chiapas is poor, relative to most of Mexico.

Conversely, it is rich, relative to most of Central America. They were

not driven to despair by starvation, as some of the EZLN’s proclamations

seem to say. There are more complex reasons for revolt than the

simplistic poverty explanation favoured by most commentators. If poverty

explained anything, most of the world would be in revolutionary ferment.

This is our attempt to account for this unexpected uprising, which

briefly illuminated with its crimson glow the sombre clouds which

enshroud the planet. But let’s leave the poetry to Marcos.

REASONS FOR THE UPRISING

The most important spur to rebellion is the weakness of the social

structure. Chiapas was part of Guatemala until Mexico bought it in 1830.

It still has a Central American-style semi-feudal ruling class, of

Spanish, German and English extraction, who have little notion of the

subtleties of Mexican politics, for example they are openly racist

toward the indigenous majority. The reactionary coletos of San

Crist=F3bal, descendants of the original conquistadores, are a joke.

Their attacks on the lefty archbishop have only helped his struggle with

the Vatican. When Marcos provoked the coletos by claiming to be gay,

they took the bait, trying to discredit Marcos by publicising the story.

The redneck rancheros in the countryside are more serious,

redisappropriating land and murdering opponents in the wake of the army.

Consciously or otherwise, the struggle in Chiapas is an attempt to

modernise the state, and bring its politics in line with the rest of

Mexico. The peasants know that they can get some of their demands

granted: under pressure, the state has redistributed land before. They

voted to join the EZLN and launch the armed struggle when Mexico

supposedly joined the First World via the North American Free Trade

Agreement. They calculated that the time had come: if Mexico is to be

part of North America, Chiapas should not be left behind.

Another reason is the political awareness which grew out of the 500^(th)

Columbus anniversary, which did not coincide with a period of defeat for

the indigenas, as was the case in Guatemala and elsewhere. Indigenous

movements are flavour of the month, and the EZLN has made much mileage

out of the ethnicity of its members. Another is the simple fact that

Marcos and co. chose Chiapas to hang out in the eighties; brilliant

leaders can make an important contribution. Then there is the radical

Catholic Church. Liberationist priests organised among the indigenous

peasants more successfully than the rest of the left. The EZLN were

unable to make much headway when they first arrived because they were

atheists. So they changed their position.

According to Ojarasca, February 94, citing Amnesty International’s

Mexico: Human Rights in Rural Areas, most land disputes in the seventies

(87 out of 115) were caused by wealthy farmers invading communal land.

In the eighties the tide began to turn. The Organisation of Indigenous

Peoples of South East Mexico, for example, was founded in Chiapas in

1983, declaring “We fight for a better life, for which justice is needed

for the urban and rural poor. The government of our country, which is a

government of the rich, represses and murders us, and we have found from

the study of the history of man and of Mexico that only organised

struggle will enable us to obtain a new way of life...” (Ojarasca). 128

fincas were invaded by one group of armed peasants in 1983. In June

1985, the head of one of the peasant organisations announced that his

people had occupied 109 large properties in various parts of Chiapas.

In response, the state government allowed landlords to employ

paramilitary forces and municipal police to prevent squatting, assisted

by “anti-drug” units with helicopters and planes paid for by the USA,

and the state police detained, tortured and murdered peasant leaders.

Entire communities were evicted by police and private thugs, who swarmed

in before dawn, forcing people to abandon their homes and possessions,

which they burned. Then they took the peasants by truck to the nearest

highway and dumped them. But with all due respect to the bereaved and

dispossessed, this is small beer by Central American standards. During

the eighties, about 50,000 refugees preferred Chiapas to Guatemala,

where at least 110,000 civilians have been murdered by their government.

In Chiapas, repression was sufficient to provoke resistance, and

insufficient to crush it The government spent more on social programs in

Chiapas than in any other state. From 1989 to 1994, federal spending

rose more than tenfold to $250m.. Since this was obviously a concession

to political unrest, it encouraged it.

The Zapatistas did not arrive in a vacuum. They had to work with, or

compete with, liberation theologists, Maoists and indigenous groups in

the slow cooking cauldron of Chiapas. None of these factors explain the

uprising; rebellions happen, not because of any combination of causes,

but because people decide to rebel. The Zapatistas, with their vague

ideology, are well suited to recuperate the class struggle in Chiapas,

turning it into a campaign for national democratic reform.

In naming themselves after the original Zapatistas, the present lot are

being romantic rather than historical. Zapata’s contribution to the

Mexican Revolution of 1910–17 was avowedly parochial. He and his

followers had the aim of resisting enclosures and sugar agribusiness in

Morelos. Though this state is adjacent to the Federal District, they

rarely ventured outside their own backwater. It is difficult not to

laugh when one reads of the fire engine incident in the capital. So

unfamiliar were the moustachioed bumpkins with the big city, they

assumed it was a military vehicle, and opened fire, killing all on

board[1]. They were defeated by reactionary generals with a less

localist perspective. It is tempting to see this as an example of

natural selection. But at least Zapata and his followers wanted to

defend traditional peasant community against capitalist development,

which is more than can be said for the latter-day Zapatistas.

The promises of the Revolution (in a word, land to the peasants, both

collectively and in small plots) were often unfulfilled. By the

mid-eighties, only 2.7 million families had received the promised plots,

whilst 3 or 4 million peasants waited, patiently or otherwise.

Owners of big landed estates are rich bastards who live off the backs of

the poor, but they are not typical capitalists. In fact their existence

can be an impediment to capitalist development. Their labourers are

often not wage slaves but tenant farmers who pay rent in labour and in

kind, though in Mexico, and particularly in Chiapas, there is an ancient

tradition of debt slavery, which in practice is almost indistinguishable

from actual slavery. The land owners sell produce for money but don’t

feel the need to invest it in new methods of production. Unlike the dour

burgers of capitalism’s rosy dawn, these rakes and degenerates, after

allowing for a few incidental expenditures such as arming their goons

and lackeys, spend their ill-gotten gains on pleasure and luxury. The

development of capitalist agriculture requires the breaking up of these

landed estates. This is where peasant movements for progress, such as

the Zapatistas, come in. Peasants can be used by politicians to struggle

for development against reactionary landlords. Often this is done under

the guise of social justice, under the slogan Land to the Peasants. The

idea is to turn the serfs, debt slaves and bonded labourers into petty

bourgeois proprietors who will then compete against each other to sell

their produce on the open market. Many will be ruined, and driven into

the urban proletariat, desperate to work and relatively easy to exploit,

and a few will become millionaires. This process has been central to

capitalist accumulation throughout its history. It is continuing today

on an unprecedented scale with the break-up of the collective farms in

China.

Some countries, France being the exemplum, have deliberately kept a

class of conservative peasants, against purely economic logic, for

political reasons. In Mexico, the inefficient small producer and ejido

systems have been perpetuated because of the unrest which would greet

their abolition.

Even when collective landholdings are created, they have to impose

capitalist discipline in order to produce for the market. More

frequently, small landholders become owners of individual plots, and

have to work overtime to survive. The market price of a commodity is

determined by the socially necessary labour time involved in producing

it. An American farmer produces a pound of corn in a fraction of the

time taken by a Mexican peasant; this determines the price. Land

redistribution is also subject to the limitations of wealth

redistribution in general. If wealth is more fairly distributed, without

the abolition of the market and wage labour, some people will quickly

gain an advantage over others through their skills at buying and

selling. Soon, wealth will once again concentrate in few hands. ‘The

rich get richer and the poor get poorer’ is in the nature of property.

It cannot be ended by redistribution.

This is not to say that all peasant struggles are inherently

pro-capitalist. There are very strong pressures towards a peasant

becoming a simple petty bourgeois commodity producer (as in rural

France) but this is not the only reason for trying to get hold of a

smallholding. It can also be a place to live where you’re not paying

rent to a landlord and you can use it to grow food for yourself. There

have always been elements of this in the rural struggle in Mexico, but

it has mostly been recuperated in the interests of capitalist

development. The current uprising in Chiapas is no exception. In 1911,

Zapatismo was localist when the bourgeoisie was nationalist. Today it is

nationalist, but meanwhile, the bosses have regrouped on a global scale.

At the beginning, in response to government allegations of foreign

influence, the Zapatistas strenuously denied that any Guatemalan Maya

Indians were involved. In other words, the Zapatistas’ Maya indigenism

is subordinate to their Mexican nationalism, which is passionately

expressed in many of their writings. In contrast, the bosses have no

country. The US and Mexican ruling classes cooperated against the

uprising, the Chase Manhattan bank told the Mexican government to crack

down, and the Guatemalan army openly sealed the border against Zapatista

escapees in February 1995. The Zapatistas’ internationalism is

restricted to talking to foreign journalists and appealing to liberals

to put pressure on Congress. This is logical, since international

working class solidarity is not necessary to achieve land redistribution

in Chiapas, nor more democracy in Mexico.

Amor y Rabia is not among the organisations “that strive, with honesty

and patriotism, for the betterment of Mexico”. They asked Marcos a lot

of hard questions about nationalism, and he gave some slick answers.

They said “The ‘Nation’ is used with an abstract feeling of a patriotism

that ultimately does nothing more than pit us against one another,

country against country” (interview in Love & Rage August 94). Marcos

replied “When we speak of the nation we are speaking of history, of a

history of common struggle with historical references that make us

brothers to one group of people without distancing us from other

groups”. This is called having your cake and eating it. The question of

autonomy is complicated. We do not want a dreary, homogenous world ruled

by the World Congress of Workers’ Councils. We recognise that there must

be different communities with their own traditions and cultures. Some

indigenous communities refer to themselves as “nations”. However,

communists oppose the nation state, whereas the EZLN equivocates on the

issue. Marcos wants a more federal Mexico, with respect for the autonomy

of different groups and areas. But the USA was founded on this basis.

This does not challenge the operation of the market economy, which

forces a tendency toward centralisation on any nation state.

Not only are small farmers forced to produce for the market, neither are

they good ecologists. When poor peasants take over land in Chiapas, the

first thing they do is often to chop down the trees. There have been

fights between peasants and police trying to defend ecological reserves.

Some of the main demands of Zapatista peasants are for better roads to

get their produce to market, electricity to drive machinery and

television, etc. These uncomfortable facts are generally ignored by

their supporters. People assume that the poor are good, and the rich are

bad, and therefore we must support the former. The point is not to

assign good or bad, but to face the fact that much environmental damage

in the world is being done by desperate poor people, not just by

MacDonald’s. Obviously, they are driven to do this by the world market

economy which has deprived them of a livelihood, but uncritical support

is no solution to this. Neither is a moralistic antagonism to

corporations without a critique of the capitalist mode of production.

This is where we hope this article will fill a gap.

NATURE OF MEXICAN POLITICS

In contrast with other Latin American regimes, the Mexican state is a

consummate recuperator. The Mexican army and police are almost fluffy

compared with their counterparts elsewhere. Mexico is far more

sophisticated in dealing with armed insurrection than Chile, Argentina,

Guatemala, El Salvador, or even Britain. That is why the repression in

Chiapas has been so tame. In January 94, with support for the Zapatistas

apparently widespread within Mexico, fear of the insurrection spreading

was a factor in the state’s hesitancy. But the continuation of the

softly-softly approach is rooted in the nature of Mexican politics. The

state instinctively grants some of the demands of any serious

opposition, so its apparent climbdown to the Zapatistas on 12 January 94

was not so humiliating as it appears. Since then, it has again granted

rebel demands, for example the resignation of the governor of Chiapas.

Militarily speaking, the Mexican army could have taken out the EZLN in a

few days. The biggest parade the EZLN staged for the press involved only

400 rifles, some of which were fake. In February 95, the troops

deliberately allowed Marcos and the rest of the Indigenous Committees to

escape before parachuting into Las Caadas. Recuperation, or cooptation

of resistance, does ultimately derive from fear of resistance, but then

so does repression, so in itself this says nothing. Generally, the

ability to recuperate rather than repress is a sign of strength. An

Interior Minister once said of the opposition “What resists also

supports”. In 1970, left-wing president Echeverrea secretly organised

peasant land seizures in Sonora and elsewhere, giving him an excuse to

disappropriate his wealthy latifundista opponents. In the period leading

up to the Chiapas events of New Year 94, president Salinas continued the

policy of incorporating rebellious peasant organisations into the state,

and implemented the Solidarity program which provides subsidised food

and health care to millions, even while amending Article 27 of the

Constitution to enable the sale of communal lands (ejidos), though this

was less relevant to Chiapas, where the land reforms of 1915 and 1934

had never been implemented.

To summarise, NY Times hack Alan Riding: “A traditional way of advancing

politically is to emerge as an independent peasant agitator. Having

gathered a group of landless peasants under the banner of ‘the fight for

justice’, the aspiring leader can then negotiate with — and, it seems,

invariably sell out to — the authorities. But the system will normally

try to coopt him without destroying his appeal, thereby enabling him to

continue living off ‘his’ peasants and, when deemed necessary by

officials, to divide other groups of militant peasants”. Distant

Neighbors[2], p269. This is too cynical, since it casts aspersions on

the sincerity of simple, honest folk who risk their lives daily. But

Riding is cynical because recuperation has worked. It didn’t work in

Chiapas mainly because of its dinosauric dynasties of backward bourgeois

bastards.

Even after the massacre of left-wing students in 1968, the new

government under Echeverrea was able to coopt most of the survivors,

letting them out of jail, announcing a “democratic opening”, and an

anti-imperialist foreign policy. Echeverrea boasted that lefties who

were on the streets in the late sixties were in the government in the

early seventies. Others were found dead in ditches — but these were, of

course, an extremist minority. The Zapatistas are too clever to fall

into either of these traps.

However impressive the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party)‘s

pragmatic populism, the rest of the world’s ruling class have turned

against the social-democratic corporatist style of management. The OECD

admitted Mexico in March 94, during the first stage of the Zapatista

uprising, signalling confidence in the PRI’s ability to dismantle the

social contract. The next stage in the integration of Mexico into the

world economy came in January 95. Zedillo didn’t exactly stage an

economic crisis, but it was no accident. This crisis “forced” him to

borrow heavily from the IMF and the USA. Mexico doesn’t always dance to

the US tune. She has successfully blackmailed the USA into rescheduling

debts in the past by pointing out the consequences of a Mexican default

on the US financial system. But Zedillo can conveniently cast Uncle Sam

as the villain as he introduces austerity, blame repression on

conditions imposed by these creditors, and promote the scam of

nationalism for the masses whilst being an internationalist himself,

acting with the rest of the world’s ruling class. He can always rely on

the left to whine about “national humiliation” (Proceso, 30 January 95)

and so on. Five days after offering “the participation of the indigenous

communities in the sustainable development of Chiapas” and the usual

verbiage, “una paz justa y digna” (La Jornada, 5 February 95), and

immediately following the $20bn. American loan to hold up the peso, he

moved thousands of troops into the Zapatista strongholds of the Lacandon

rain forest, causing some fatalities and thousands of refugees. But most

Zapatista supporters simply hid their weapons and went back to their

fields.

Almost everyone sees the crisis as proof that Zedillo’s government has

failed. The 20 February Proceso talks of industry being “on the point of

economic and financial collapse”. But it isn’t a collapse, just a

restructuring. Rather than being a symptom of fundamental bugs in the

objective operations of the economic system, crises are intimately

connected to the class struggle. Although crisis can be forced on the

bosses by workers refusing to work, in times of low class struggle it’s

the other way round; the crisis is a strategy for implementing

austerity. 35% was added to fuel prices, 20% to transportation. VAT went

up to 15%. The price of tortillas was raised 26% in April 1995. The

minimum wage rose 10% when inflation is estimated to be 42%. Driving

large enterprises like Grupo Sidek to the wall is good for the economy,

since the goods will be produced by workers in smaller units, less well

organised, for lower wages. The demoralisation produced is an

opportunity for austerity, and the falling peso boosts exports and

reduces imports. Many of the firms that went out of business during the

February 1995 currency crisis couldn’t pay off their workers.

The crisis has started to attack its main target: the large sector of

workers accustomed to jobs-for-life at a living wage, with health and

welfare benefits, without having to work too hard. Federal and state

employees number around three million, and related sectors like banking

offer similar sinecures to millions more. Mexico is rightly famous for

its inefficient and corrupt bureaucrats. This is anachronistic,

considering that Mexico and the USA virtually overlap. Perestroika, or

making workers work, is overdue. For Mexico to play its role within

NAFTA, this sector has to be broken. Other targets of the debt squads

include the subsidies on transport, cooking oil, tortillas and beans,

and the health and social security programs. This will take years of

crisis, which will marginalise recent events in Chiapas. Thirty thousand

layoffs have been announced in Pemex, the national oil company.

Redundancies will drive the unemployed into the maquiladoras on the

border, and over it.

Poor immigrants are generally prepared to work harder and longer, in

worse conditions, for lower wages. The US economy needs its illegals, so

the anti-immigrant campaign is not really about repatriating immigrants,

but making them more insecure and easier to exploit. In California,

Proposition 187 passed by a 2 to 1 majority. This measure cracks down on

alleged illegal immigrants, requiring that all the other state agencies

cooperated with the INS. Social workers, teachers and nurses are

required to deny services to anyone suspected of being an illegal, and

to report anyone without proof of legal residency to the immigration

pigs. The Personal Responsibility Act, passed by the House of

Representatives on March 24, also targets immigrants. This cuts off a

wide range of benefits even to those with legal status. The aim is to

restore a reign of terror to the underground labour markets, making

illegals cheaper to maintain, by denying them benefits, and more

insecure, thus easier to exploit. Though it appeals to US-born workers,

the campaign aims to make all American workers worse off. The way to

oppose it is by explaining how it harms our interests, rather than by

trying to persuade workers it’s wrong to be racist.

On April 8, the Mexico City government closed down the capital’s

state-owned bus company, laying off all of its nearly 13,000 workers,

then using the police to run a reduced service. (The police are

themselves an over-employed sector, ripe for restructuring). The

“alternative” union SUTAUR, its leader Ricardo Barco and the government

used classic tactics to undermine the battle against the layoffs. The

union leaders urged the workers to cool off, but were beaten up and

jailed, making them into martyrs. In fact, SUTAUR, despite its

non-affiliation to the Labour Congress, is part of the corporatist

state.

Despite the frequent use of the words “volcano” and “earthquake” to

describe the Mexican proletariat, there has not been a major outbreak of

class struggle. This is not to say there has been none. When the PRIista

Trade Union Congress, afraid of riots, cancelled the 1995 May Day

parade, 100,000 turned out anyway, and a few windows got broken. In 1994

some anarchists led by Amor y Rabia protested against army repression in

Chiapas and elsewhere by hijacking a bus and using it to block the main

road outside the army headquarters in Mexico City. Then they poured out

of the bus and starting spraying graffiti all over the walls of the

barracks. The two sentries on duty ran away when they saw all these

people in balaclavas streaming off the bus, thinking that the Zapatistas

had reached the capital. After 20 minutes or so and a few arguments with

soldiers they headed off home, trashing a few cop cars on the way. Petty

harassment of political opposition has been widespread since the

uprising began. Amor y Rabia had their Mexico City box number closed by

the government.

The opposition, from the Zapatistas to big business interests, criticise

the PRI for its continuous 66-year rule. In fact, sections of the PRI

may want to go into opposition. There is certainly a fierce internal

debate about reforming the system, evidenced by assassinations. But

there is no neutral civil service, ready to serve whichever party wins.

From the National Palace to the villages, the PRI is the environment,

not the competition. In Mexico City, the PRI is that department of the

government which organises winning elections. A couple of examples can

illustrate the all-encompassing nature of the party at grass-roots

level. In the town of Chamula in Chiapas there have been several

expulsions of hundreds of people who have converted to Protestantism.

The state says it can’t intervene in the affairs of the indigenous

people. Given the divisive role of Prod God Squads in Central America,

this sounds fine. But in fact, the expulsions are the work of PRI thugs,

and the expulsados those who refused to vote PRI. Chamula, like most

indigenous communities, often returns over 100% PRI. Here is a one

reason why, from the town of Paste: “Gomez and his neighbor are Tzoltzil

[sic] natives who live in the village’s poor section, where residents

support an opposition political party. Ruling party supporters, who dole

out government work, live in nicer homes and save plum jobs for their

own kind”. (Oregonian, 27 March 95). This is supposed to be shocking.

The arrogant assumption that everyone in the world would appreciate

American-style freedom of expression seems amusing to us, but this is

the fuel that flies the B-52. The difficulty of PRIzing Mexico out of

the one-party system was illustrated by events in Tabasco in early 1995.

The government tried to replace the PRI governor with an opposition one

who claimed the election result was fraudulent, but the local PRI

organised against this, and threatened secession of the oil-rich state.

There is no movement capable of seriously challenging the PRI.

Cárdenas’s PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) was only founded

because the PRI did not choose Cárdenas as its candidate. He may have

won the 1988 election, but the PRI unsportingly manipulated the election

computers to ensure the succession for Salinas. This is one of the main

reasons the EZLN urged people to risk their lives fighting the

“dictatorship”. One of the first things the EZLN did was to demand the

resignation of the government and the formation of a transitional

government to convoke free and democratic elections for August 94.

(L’Unita, 4 January 94). In case the PRI once again defied the

Democratic Will Of The Mexican People, the Zapatistas held a National

Democratic Convention in the Lacandon jungle just before the August 94

elections to organise resistance. The futility of opposing the PRI from

this perspective was well illustrated by the PRD, which used classic

PRIista techniques to control the make-up of the Convention, to ensure

it would vote for them. Lots of people could not obtain credentials

because they were not members of the PRD. That is the way politics works

in Mexico. The idea that people should be free to have whatever opinion

they want, so long as they don’t do anything about it, is not deeply

ingrained. The Convention was a soggy collection of journalists, union

delegates, urban and peasant organisations, human and women’s rights

activists, plus our spy, listening to speeches about Democracy and

Justice. To their credit, Amor y Rabia refused to participate, whilst

their US counterparts, Love and Rage, do support the Commission for

Democracy in Mexico, (L&R; March 95 p17) showing the absurdities of a

decentralised approach. The EZLN urged the indigenous people to vote for

the PRD, since abstentions are counted for the PRI. As it turned out,

the PRI won more or less fair and square, with the PRD coming in third

at 17%, learning the hard way one of the problems with democracy; people

might vote for the wrong candidate.

The piqued PRD formed an “alternative government”. In Tabasco, they got

well stitched up by the local PRI, and in Chiapas, the alternative

government has been rather accident-prone. At the moment, the EZLN is

calling for a united front of all the opponents of the one-party system,

whom they refer to collectively as “Civil Society”: “We call on all

social and political forces of the country, to all honest Mexicans, to

all of those who struggle for the democratisation of the national

reality, to form a NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT, including the National

Democratic Convention and ALL forces, without distinction by religious

creed, race or political ideology, who are against the system of the

state party”. This includes the overtly free-market opposition PAN

(National Action Party). Marcos says “If there is a neoliberal proposal

for the country, we shouldn’t try to eliminate it but confront it. If

there is a Trotskyite proposal, a Maoist proposal, an anarchist

proposal, or proposals from the Guevaristas, the Castristas, the

Existentialists or whatever ‘ists’ that you may think of, they shouldn’t

be eliminated...”, and goes on to propose a national debate involving

everyone except the PRI. Neoliberal economics is not just an idea, it

means starvation and cholera. Most of the “ists” listed above should be

eliminated, through the authoritarian imposition of the needs of the

working class.

The EZLN tells people what they want to hear. Talking to the Mexican

media, they go on about Democracy and National Sovereignty. Talking to

anarchists, they diss the left as vanguardist, in contrast to the

humble, democratic, libertarian approach. According to Marcos, the EZLN

learned from the indigenous people about direct democracy and instant

revocability (elected officials can be recalled at any time). “You have

to convince the people that your opinion is correct. This will radically

change the concept of revolution...”. Haven’t we heard this before? Rosa

Luxemburg’s intervention in the German Revolution of 1918/19 was based

on just such a false dichotomy. The content of her politics was the same

as the “dictatorial” Bolsheviks (or maybe even a little worse). Only the

form was different. The counter-revolution was no less severe because

the workers had voted for it. More recently, the disastrous events in

Eastern Europe were also launched by direct democrats who convinced the

people that their opinions were correct. Ensuring that leaders are

required to convince people does not “radically change the concept of

revolution”.

DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY

The media love the Zapatistas and Marcos has replaced Ché in the

iconography of the left. But being sexy and writing bad poetry is no

substitute for a coherent revolutionary program. The reason the EZLN is

so vague is because its program is open to anything except the current

status quo. When they say “We believe that an authentic respect for

freedom and the democratic will of the people are the indispensable

prerequisites for the improvement of the economic despread resistance,

but the war of all against all. When the reactionary revolts in Eastern

Europe were underway, we tried to see something positive in them. But

the crisis cannot trick the working class into taking up a revolutionary

perspective.

No doubt some readers will say “it’s easy for you to sit there and

criticise”, and they are quite right. It may seem smug to knock the

Zapatistas from the sidelines. But this is a perennial red herring. The

fact that the Zapatistas and their supporters live in hardship and risk

their lives does not in any way demonstrate that their program is what

the Mexican proletariat needs. This article should provide an

alternative to the almost universal uncritical laudation which Marcos

and co. have received. We would like to have links with class struggle

militants in Mexico, but with our limited resources, and hardly knowing

anyone else who can be relied on, we have found this impossible.

Pessimism can be self-confirming — would it not be better to keep quiet?

Why not go further, and tell lies? This is the road to leftism. We

prefer to tell the truth, as far as we can see it.

[1] Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. John Womack, Random House, NY

1970.

[2] Distant Neighbors. Alan Riding, Random House, NY 1986.