Part 3: A Commune in Chiapas?

Traditional accumulation and social structure

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.[13] Similarly the Cardenas reforms had little effect in the 1930s. Some land was redistributed, but it was all of poor quality, ‘so steep the campesinos had to tie themselves to trees to plow, while the rancheros continued to hold great swathes in the rolling valleys.’ [14]

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 labor-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 — 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 laborers or debt-peons. Whether this is by forcing employes to buy from the hacienda shop, raping their wives or daughters, or executing natives who try to organize, racism has buttressed the power of the landowner and served to nail the price of labor-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 labor, 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 landowner’s 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 ‘serve the people’. In fact they serve to demobilize 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, recognized 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 proletarianization by refusing to go to the cities now found they had to survive by selling their labor-power wherever they could and eking out some sort of existence on a tiny patch of barren land.

1970s — eviction and resistance in the Lacandon

By the early ‘70s, 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;[15] the rest ordered to leave. There was immediate resistance to the evictions — 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 guerrilla 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.[16]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 — or one of highly-integrated opposites — 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 — 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 ‘80s: the army and the police combining with the Guardias Blancas to suppress land takeovers and murder peasant leaders.

New patterns of accumulation

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 Chiapas’s 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 Mexico’s 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 Mexico’s 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. Chiapas’s 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:[17] 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.[18] 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 labor-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 Zapatistas’ frequent references to mortality.

The sparks of rebellion

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.[19] 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 Indians’ small corn or coffee crops compete with modern US agribusiness? The answer was that they wouldn’t.

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 Castellanos’s murderous governorship of the state (1982–88) 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 organizations such as CIOAC and the Association of Regional Independent Campesinos (ARIC), which had been set up by Maoists in the ‘70s 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 organizing it?

Formation of the EZLN [20]

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-fueled 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 skillfully 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 — 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 ‘Red Bishop’, a figure much hated by the latifundistas and rancheros) organized a ‘Congress of Indian Peoples’ in San Cristobal. Shocked into action by the anger displayed at the Congress, Ruiz not only stepped up the church’s 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 cooperation between the party of the church and the church of the party. In fact the 1970s saw the highpoint of Catholicism’s flirtation with Marxism. Confronted with military dictatorships across almost the whole of Latin America, many Catholics believed, for example that: ‘The class struggle is a fact and neutrality in the question is not possible’ or ‘To participate in the class struggle...leads to a classless society without owners or dispossessed, without oppressor and oppressed.’[21]Liberation theology even had its own Che — the body of Camillo Torres, Colombian priest-turned-guerrilla 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 — in an excommunicated liberation theology it perceives the possibility of its own dissolution.) By continually encouraging the revolt of ‘the poor’ 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 realization 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, ‘Religion 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.’[22] When Marcos says ‘We want liberation — but not the theology’, 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 — 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 organizing 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 organizing. 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 — but unbeknownst 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 organizing 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 — 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 emphasizes the military struggle over the social, they recognized the need to participate in grassroots organizations — a lesson they may have learned 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 cooperation 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 program PRONASOL rolled into Chiapas in the early 1990s. With it rolled some of the old Linea Proletaria cadre, now part of Salinas’s 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 Indians’ 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 reorganizing their communities. They even managed to get some PRONASOL funds on the sly for weapons.

All these elements — 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 reorganization 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 organization. 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 1992–93.

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: ‘[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.’[23]

From its FLN origins, then, we know that the army itself could be a sufficient form for the hierarchical organization of the struggle. A political cadre could operate within the army to transmit the line of the organization and its leadership to both combatants and noncombatants. Leninism, as a ‘hierarchic organization of ideology’ (Debord), does not require an obvious party form; it is enough that a cadre of militants exist with a leadership — perhaps a hidden leadership — 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 ‘parachuted in from the outside’. 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 reexamine their ideas. Out of this crisis came a commitment to a vague form of left reformism, utilizing ideas such as civil society. Desperate to survive, the EZLN has usually pitched for the lowest, and least controversial, common denominator in its organizing efforts and communiques — 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 organization 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.

Zapatista organization

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 300–400 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 recognizes the pressing demands of life under siege. The remoteness of the Indians’ lives from regular wage labor, and the communal nature of farming which in any case is labor-intensive only seasonally, enables the Zapatistas to carve out large portions of time for meetings and organizing.

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 centers 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 70–80 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 state’s 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 militarization 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 — 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 Indian’s 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 characterized by the slogans: ‘Commanding obeying’ and ‘Everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves’. 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 workers’ councils — 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 neighboring Guatemala, rather the EZLN appears to be the base of support for the self-organized 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 ‘we will take only that share to which we are entitled’, they are saying ‘we will take less than our share.’ 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 ‘commanding obeying’ 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 — ‘The Rights and Obligations of the Peoples in Struggle’, ‘The Rights and Obligations of the Revolutionary Armed Forces’ — 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.[24] 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 ‘we are not going back.’ Naturally they are mediations, but they are at least mediations which have enabled the Zapatista struggle to move beyond visceral class antagonism into self-organization — a coherence not seen in the Mexican countryside since the days of the Ayala Plan.

Any description of Zapatista organization 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 woman’s 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 atomization of the village to form a developing unity based on the rich variety of their needs. The space for women’s organization has not opened up because of the rebellion, instead the women’s 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 ‘women’s integration into military structures remains the surest way to defuze the subversive potential of their choice to break with the past.’[25] 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 realized in the organic and relatively informal structures of the EZLN. And in response to the state’s militarization 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 employer’s 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 — for example organizing women’s marches against state militarization in the tourist town of San Cristobal.

The women’s 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 militarization 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 ‘ultra-left’ and the academic autonomists. The ‘ultra-left’ tend to see the Zapatista as a desperate guerrilla fighter manipulated by hidden leaders; the academics see the Indian reasserting his or her labor 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

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 polarization in urban societies. It is perfectly suited to the rapid movement and social change that takes place in cities during industrialization, 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 revolutionizing 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 polarization. But the Soviet experience of War Communism, NEP and particularly collectivization, 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 characterized by wage-labor and new farming techniques, peasant production has at its heart unspecialized production for consumption, family labor, 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 — 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-labor that might include: working on ranches, seasonal work on a finca (where an employer’s shop system might operate, or debt-peonage be dominant), or fully-integrated wage-labor on dam construction, or at the oil operations of the north-east. All this work is either seasonal or temporary — 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-labor 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 proletarianized because it has no need of their labor-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 — they are part of the ‘different world’ of the peasant. They have been unable to avoid wage-labor altogether — its influence has been important to the Zapatistas’ 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 ‘ultra-left’ 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 labor against ‘neoliberalism’. 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.

The ‘ultra-left’[26]: Mao and Marcos

Sylvie Deneuve and Charles Reeve’s article ‘Behind the Balaclavas of south-east Mexico’ is without doubt the most hostile reaction to the Indian uprising in Chiapas. Reacting against the romanticization 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 Indians’ 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 ‘must never be seen’: ‘the Zapatista army is...only one part of The Organization — it is its visible part.’

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 organizations have had to revise their expectations downward — 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. ‘Behind the Balaclavas’ consequently talks a great deal about the organization of politics, or the politics of organization, 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 Indians’ struggle misrepresented: the land occupations are not about land, only revenge; the womens’ struggle is sidelined into the army and has no other expression; the FZLN dominates civil society outside Chiapas; the EZLN is made up of ‘young people, marginal, modern, multilingual...their profile has little to do with the isolated Indian that some imagine.’ And so on and so forth. Deneuve and Reeve’s 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 ‘Behind the Balaclavas’.

‘Behind the Balaclavas’ 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, specialized 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 organizational forms that were imported with the FLN?

Ultimately we cannot give a definitive answer to this. We have already traced the history of the FLN’s 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 — especially when the representative forms are generated from within. Such a move would falsely suggest that the inspiring acts of class struggle — liberation of prisoners from jail, land occupations, etc. — would have happened without the mediating and representative forms of the EZLN.[27] 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 FLN’s vanguard model has undoubtedly fuzed with the rebellious and autonomous energies of the Indians, and this organizational 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 specialized 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 center stage for the nation’s 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 emphasize the visits of workers’ and students’ 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 — one of two or three ladinos among tens of thousands of pure blood Indians — 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 Marcos’s 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.

The forces of production

Is the uprising ‘the final episode of the slow and peculiar integration of this peripheral region by Mexican capital’ 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 ‘different world’ 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 proletarianization of the population, but the experience of capitalism in the ‘Third World’ 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 ‘ultra-left’ 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 revolutionized social relations in the villages. Breaking down the gender barrier, releasing the energy and confidence of the young; its need for centralized organization compels previously isolated villages to communicate and work together. Through its need to impose itself on the outside world it is certainly a modernizing 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 ‘different world’ 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.[28] 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: ‘Its 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.’[29] In the autonomous municipalities of Chiapas private holdings are rare, the collective prevails.

Nationalism

The ultra-leftists’ strongest charge against the Zapatistas is that they are nationalists: the Zapatista project is nothing more than a retreat from the rigors 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 ‘ultra-leftists’ imply, they are seeking alliances with sections of the national political class, maneuvering 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 Mexico’s 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 Zapatistas’ 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 Zapatista’s ‘nationalism.’ The red, white and green of the Mexican flag are also the colors 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 EZ’s communiques, which are as confusing as ever. There we can find statements that speak both of ‘the importance of the patria (homeland)’ and of ‘a world without frontiers or borders.’ As Wildcat say in ‘Unmasking the Zapatistas’, 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-labor 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 ‘ultra-left’ articles we are examining were all written before the EZLN developed their project of the Encuentro, the international meetings ‘for humanity and against neoliberalism.’ 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 organizing 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. [30]But the Zapatistas, at first recognizing their need for international solidarity, particularly foreign peace observers to mitigate the worst offenses 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 anybody’s guess. They may easily fall apart, given the diverse nature of the participants and the generally abstract nature of opposition to ‘neoliberalism’. 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 ‘anti-capitalist’ movement.

The Academics [31]

The Zapatistas have certainly been a great inspiration to some — 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 ‘ultra-left’ groups, the academics have failed to ground their analyzes adequately in the material conditions of Chiapas. The academics, however, have swung the other way — 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 ‘ultra-left’, they are so overjoyed that something — anything — 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 labor 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 ‘not a peasant movement ...[but] ‘a recomposition of the world of labor...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.’[32]

Things deteriorate further when John Holloway denies the possibility of identifying the class position of any social group or individual anywhere — 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: ‘Since 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.’

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-labor, 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 Holloway’s reasoning ‘in 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.’ [33]

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 ‘sociology’), 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 atomized 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.

The refusal to take power and civil society

In rejecting the classical model of guerrilla war since the uprising, and through measures such as the ban on members of the EZLN holding public posts, the ‘refusal to take power’, 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 — in the areas where they have been able to. They have forced landlords to flee — and killed some — 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 ‘reabsorbing state power’), 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 ‘civil society’, 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 characterizes civil society as ‘that unstated coalition of opposition rank-and-file, urban slum-dwellers, independent campesino organizations 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.’ We would also add human rights and environmental groups to the mix.

The point is not that, among these groups constantly networking with each other, the working class elements are encouraged to subsume their needs to a middle class agenda — on the contrary, they are encouraged to strengthen their ‘autonomy’, just as everyone is. Instead it is that with heterogeneity being everything in civil society, the working class organizations 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 ‘common struggle’, 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 labor 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 ‘in addition to their own little project they should open their horizon to a national project linked with what is happening.’ The ‘opening up of space for discussion’ 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 ‘little project’, 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 favor of those of the middle class, or an imposition by the working class of its rich and varied needs — 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 program.[34] 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.

Dignity

Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico concludes with Holloway’s treatment of the Zapatista concept of dignity. Marxism, he argues, has developed a number of terms to describe capital’s 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 ‘self-valorization’ (itself a not unproblematic reversal of a central capitalist category). This lack of a positive pole around which to organize has hampered the development of a conscious movement against the capitalist mode of production. But with their concept of ‘dignity’ the Zapatistas may have filled a gap in the market. By generalizing it, Holloway believes ‘dignity’ could become a workable idea around which to organize against the daily indignities of life under capital.

The problem he tries hard to avoid is the abstract nature of ‘dignity’ once it is universalized. By attempting to generalize it, he is rupturing it from the place where it makes sense — rural Chiapas, where it acquires such a powerful resonance. There is no doubt that for the Indians dignidad is a crucial concept — 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 — many of which do not apply to vast swathes of the world’s 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 one’s labor-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 capital’s advantage — 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 ‘the uprising would be strengthened if it were made explicit that exploitation is systematic to the systematic negation of dignity.’ But nothing is made explicit in that part of the Zapatista program 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 ‘program for Mexico’ is either reformist or naively open to reformist manipulation. The real process is the reorganization of the Indians’ lives and communities. It is Zapatismo’s revolutionary practice within Chiapas that is the real inspiration for the rebel against capitalism.