A-Infos (en) Zapatistas & Int'l Circulation of Struggles -I- of -VI- 1. An indigenous rebellion

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

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

Folks: What follows is a draft of a paper prepared for a conference on

"Globalization from Below" being held right now at Duke University. I
just
finished his draft, which I will present to the conference in about 30

minutes. It is a rough draft and I would appreciate any constructive
criticism or discussion that reading it might provoke. I am sharing it

with you at this point because it concerns the work we are all
involved in
and discusses many of the problems of that work.

Harry

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 8 Feb 1998 09:53:39 -0600 (CST)
From: "Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave@eco.utexas.edu>
To: Chiapas 95 Moderators <chiapas@eco.utexas.edu>
Subject: E;H.Cleaver:Zapatistas & Int'l Circulation of Struggles, Feb
8

This posting has been forwarded to you as a service of
Accion Zapatista de Austin.

The Zapatistas
and the
International Circulation of Struggles



        For a long, long time many activists have recognized two
things:
first, that capitalism operates on a global level and second, that to
achieve enough power to overthrow capitalism the working class must
find ways to organize its own struggles at the same level.

        The title of this conference implies a critique, with which I
agree, that something has been missing from a great many accounts of
the global character of capital. We have an enormous literature,
generated by several generations of historians and economists,
anthopologists and cultural critics on the character of capitalist
operations at the level of the world as a whole. From the study of
imperialism through that of the international division of labor to
current
preoccupations with the latest phase of "globalization" we retain a
substantial literature and considerable understanding of the
cleverness
and brutality of those operations. On the other hand, the extent and
depth of the study of the international character of working class
struggle is considerably less. Fortunately, that situation has been
changing somewhat with the urgency to find new effective ways to
counter capital's world-wide offensive during these last years.
Indeed,
there are reasons to believe that the force of necessity has been
pushing
innovation of such resistance from below faster than many have
recognized or been able to study and theorize. It is not at all clear,

however, that what we need is to oppose the globalization of capital
from above by a homologous globalization from below. The
formulation risks repeating past errors in which oppositional
movements
mirror that which they would overcome and therefore fail to transcend
it
even when they succeed. We are engaged in a war for our future and for

the future of the planet and the last thing we need is more Pyrric
victories in which we discover with horror that we have not won at
all.
It is paramount, therefore, that we accelerate both our absorption of
recent experience and our efforts to derive lessons from it for
present
and future tactics and strategy.  In this talk I want to discuss one
set of
experiences and discuss some of the questions they raise for our
study,
our strategic thinking and our organizing.

The Zapatistas and their impact

        The experiences that I want to address are those of the
Zapatista
rebellion in Southern Mexico, the world wide networks of support
which were woven for it and the way the elaboration of those networks
have transcended the traditional framework of solidarity to interweave
a
whole spectrum of different struggles into a fabric of
interconnections
highly suggestive of directions in which we might want to move.

        A movement of primarily low waged and unwaged indigenous
Mayan peasants, the Zapatista rebellion became public on January 1,
1994 when the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) came out of
the jungle to occupy several towns in the highlands of the state of
Chiapas. Since that day the images of their black ski-masked soldiers
and the words of their primary spokesperson Subcommandante Marcos
have become familiar to millions of people around the world.  If this
particular struggle in this small, relatively unknown part of the
world
had only generated its own handful of supporters in a widespread
solidarity movement as so many other struggles have done, it would
still
be of interest to the issue of resistance to globalization as far as
any such
movement would be that has been able to reach beyond its own locale to

connect with others.  But the case of the Zapatistas is of particular
interest, it seems to me, because it has not only generated wider
support
than might have been expected, it has also achieved what no other
recent
struggle has been able to do.  It has set in motion the beginnings of
a
world-wide discussion about the current state of the class struggle
and
of a world-wide mobilization aimed at finding new and more effective
ways of interlinking both opposition to capitalism and mutual aid in
the
elaboration of alternatives. It has done this not only across space
but
across a wide variety of very different kinds of struggle.  Both of
these
phenomena --discussion and mobilization-- are now widespread but still

limited in scope --there are many who have not joined in these
discussions and many struggles that remain disconnected-- but these
processes do seem to point in the right direction and therefore merit
attention.

        There are several aspects of this struggle, the way it has
developed and the impact that it has had that I would like to discuss.

First, its indigenous character and the ways its own internal and
culturally determined political processes have struck a nerve among
those from quite different ethnic backgrounds in Mexico and elsewhere
in the world. Second, the key role of computer communications in the
global circulation of solidarity and the ability to link up with other

struggles elsewhere. Third, the way its analysis of current capitalist

policy and strategy has furthered the recognition of the common enemy
at this point in history --and thus encouraged a search for common
strategies of resistance. Fourth, the insistence of the Zapatistas on
the
creation and elaboration of a diverse array of alternatives to replace

current capitalist institutions and relationships. Fifth, the
experiences
we have had with the extension of its very local practices of
encounter to
the large-scale meetings of people from many languages and different
backgrounds. Sixth, the serious obstacles that have been raised by our

growing experience in cyberspace for improving the effectiveness of
the
international circulation of struggle.

1. An indigenous rebellion

        Despite all the efforts of the Mexican government to prove
otherwise, it has become widely understood that the Zapatista
rebellion
has been an uprising of indigenous peoples, not of one people, but of
several, with different, though interrelated languages and cultural
practices.  It has been, in one sense, a renaissance of "Mexico
profundo", of mesoamerican civilization 500 hundred years after the
conquistadors destroyed its classical form.  Less widely understood
has
been the fact that this indigenous rebellion --like so many other
indigenous struggles around the world-- is no romantic revival of
cultural remnants but a newly constructed political process that has
interwoven the old and the new, tradition and radical change,
attachment
to the land and hard experience with wage labor.  What appeared at
first
as a disturbance on the margins was soon revealed as an embodiment  of

the most contemporary forms of struggle.  The rebellion has sprung
from regions in Chiapas which, over the last twenty years, have been
scenes of dramatic changes, not stagnant backwaters.  The Zapatista
movement grew out of the efforts to cope with those changes both
within communities and in the relationship among communities, from
older more established villages to those of recent vintage carved out
of
the jungle by immigrants in processes of colonization.  In a very real

sense, the Zapatista movement emerged as a tentative and transitionary

solution to precisely the problem which confronts us everywhere: how
to link up a diverse array of linguistically and culturally distinct
peoples
and their struggles, despite and beyond those distinctions, how to
weave a variety of struggles into one struggle that never loses its
multiplicity.  If for no other reason, all of us who are interested in

accomplishing the same goal at a wider level would do well to study
carefully this microcosmic experiment which so suddenly exploded in
the political firmament with the brilliance of a supernova.

        But at the same time this indigenous rebellion speaks to those
of
us far from the  mountains of southeastern Mexico because it has
organized itself in ways which constitute profound critiques of all
those
modern political forms in which we have lost faith and offers one
example that proves viable alternatives can be, and are being,
constructed.  Instead of demanding admittance to the established
political arena, the Zapatistas' have presented a severe critique of
representative democracy.  The Zapatistas have gone far beyond
Mexican social democratic reformers --who merely wish to constrain the

ruling party in order to carve out a larger piece of the pie of
governance
for themselves-- to demand the elimination of the constitutional
structure
of the state that has sought to confine politics to the formal
electoral
arena where professional politicians act out a simulacrum of democracy

while perpetuating the brutal exploitation by capital and the genocide
of
whole peoples.

        This demand was implicit in the 1996 Zapatista call for the
formation of a national "front" --a misleadingly named network of
interlinked local and regional mobilizations-- without political party

affiliation and with a scope of political action that bypassed
electoral
politics. Its formal initiation in the Fall of 1997 sent a tremor of
fear
through the entire Mexican political establishment, both PRIista and
oppositional.  The explicit demand for fundamental constitutional
reforms that would dismantle the current structures of power was
enunciated by the Zapatistas in their forum on the Reform of the State

and in the San Andres negotiations on Indigenous Rights.  They were
written into the final San Andres Accords --which were signed by
government representatives but later repudiated as threats to the
integrity
of the nation.  This rejection of the dominant illusions of democracy
and
the organization of creative, viable alternatives outside and against
the
state has had enormous appeal not only throughout Mexico but in many
other countries as well --for many cynical resistance has begun to
change into a new willingness to once more take up the problem of
achieving real, democratic self-determination.

        On the other hand, the Zapatistas have quite explicitly
rejected
the dominant revolutionary project of the 20th Century: the seizure of

state power and its consolidation in the hands of a revolutionary
elite.
While many have yearned to see one of those massive gatherings of
hundreds of thousands of Zapatista supporters in Mexico City' Zocalo
suddenly turn into a seizure of the Presidential Palace and a toppling
of
the PRIista state, the Zapatistas themselves have rejected such non-
solutions and called for people to organize themselves autonomously
from the state in ways that can lead not to its seizure but to its
eclipse
and abolition.  This rejection has included an explanation of how they

see the EZLN itself as but a mirror image of the Mexican Army and
therefore entirely unqualified to replace it.  The Zapatista Army with
all
of the formal hierarchies of any army is viewed as a distasteful and
temporary tool to be discarded as quickly as possible.  Indeed, in
many
ways their successful creation of new political spaces has already led
to
the demotion of the Zapatista Army to a largely symbolic role.

        The Zapatista political proposal is quite different. They
offer
their own experiences of successful community self-organization and of

the effective weaving of networks of cooperation and collaboration
among diverse communities as one, but not the only, example of
practical alternatives to the modern state.  This experience has been
a
complex one which has evolved over a period of many years and has
confronted many obstacles within and among communities as well as
those created by the efforts of the PRIista state to maintain its own
structures of political control and the economic and social
subordinations of those communities.  Among those internal obstacles
are racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious and gender differences which
have
long weakened the ability of these indigenous communities to develop
alternatives capable of transcending a profound passive resistance to
the
dominant order.

        While discussion of these differences go beyond the scope of
this talk, I do want to dwell briefly on one of these internal
obstacles
which has by no means been completely transcended but which has
been confronted to the point of bringing about substantial and
inspiring
change.  That obstacle is the profound patriarchal hierarchy which has

pervaded indigenous communities and kept women in distinctly
subaltern positions where they had little power over their own bodies
and destinies and were forbidden to own land or exercise public
responsibilities (cargoes).  The Zapatista way of dealing with this
obstacle has proceeded in at least two phases: first, the acceptance
of
women into the EZLN and a willingness to accord them rank,
responsibility and command just like men, and second, the acceptance
of an autonomous initiative of indigenous women to define and specify
a series of women's rights that dramatically challenged the
traditional
structures of patriarchy.  This was not, the EZLN leadership has
emphasized, an according of rights from the top down, but an
acceptance of rights demanded autonomously.  This acceptance and
embrace of women's autonomy on their own terms is prototypical of the
centrality of autonomy in the Zapatista articulation of indigenous
demands more generally.

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