A-Infos (en) Zapatistas & Int'l Circulation of Struggles -III- of -VI- 3. The Recognition of a Common Enemy

[Ilan Shalif <gshalif@netvision.net.il>]

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H.Cleaver:
        From: owner-chiapas95-english@eco.utexas.edu

3. The Recognition of a Common Enemy

        From almost the beginning of their communications with the
rest
of the world, the Zapatistas have situated the policies of the Mexican

government within the wider framework of what in Latin America is
called Neoliberalism.  By this is meant a set of policies which 1)
privilege the market over government regulation, 2) mandate the
privatization of state enterprises, 3) reduce constraints on business
activity through the deregulation of both industry and finance, 4)
reduce
barriers to international trade and investment (both real and
financial)
and 5) impose the costs of these changes on both waged and unwaged
workers through the slashing of government supports to consumption
and the standard of living more generally.  These have been the
dominant policies in Mexico since the onset of the international debt
crisis in the early 1980s and have been deepened under the recent
regimes of Salinas and then Zedillo. The Zapatista rebellion and the
pro-
democracy upsurge to which it added emphasis helped precipitate the
crisis of those policies by the end of 1994 as the flight of fearful
hot
money brought about the Peso collapse, a $50 billion bailout and
renewed austerity and depression in Mexico.  The Zapatista attack on
Neoliberal policies, both before and after the Peso Crisis, has
resonated
across the Mexican body politic and forced a debate on these policies
in
which the government has been pushed back on the defensive and
opposition has deepened and spread.

        As their discourse on this subject has circulated around the
world it has also resonated in many other countries and social
struggles
as well.  The Intercontinental Encounters, mentioned above, were
subtitled "Against Neoliberalism and For Humanity."  This provoked
among the organizers and participants a comparison of Neoliberalism in

Mexico and the rest of Latin America with Thatcherism in Britain,
Maastricht & Schengen in Europe, IMF structural adjustment programs
everywhere, Reagan - Bush - Clinton supply-side policies in the United

States and so on. The result has been a widely shared perception of
the
unusually homogeneous character of capitalist policy in this period.
Whereas we used to be able to contrast policies of development with
those of underdevelopment in changing patterns of the global
capitalist
hierarchy of wages, income and standards of living, today we find,
virtually everywhere a systematic attack on working class income
coupled with continuing restructuring to decompose class power into
new, more manageable configurations of capitalist accumulation.

        After several years in which the politics of resistance and
struggle have been fragmented and weakened by certain theoretical
tendencies so preoccupied with the rejection of "master narratives"
that
they blinded themselves to capitalist efforts to re-impose its own
master
narrative of exploitation and alienation on the entire world, this
coalescence of recognition of a common enemy has provided a powerful
sinew to knit together widely scattered struggles.  Whereas the
Zapatista
demands for indigenous and women's autonomy and the rejection of
any singular formula for political or social organization has made
their
struggle attractive to many so-called "post-modernists", their
critique of
Neoliberalism and capitalism has linked them firmly with the Marxist
tradition of the revolutionary transcendence of capitalism.  At the
Intercontinental Encounters there were many who worried that while a
great many participants might be willing to condemn and fight against
Neoliberalism --because of its particularly nasty and retrograde
character-- they would hesitate to embrace a rejection of capitalism
tout
court. These worries proved suprisingly and encouragingly unfounded
and throughout the fabric of interconnections strengthened and
expanded through these meetings the common rejection of capitalism is
pervasive.

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