I. Introduction: The Emergence of the
Zapatistas
The EZLN emerged on New Years Day 1994
to suggest new possibilities for working class action against capital (see
Neill, "Mexico: February 1995," this volume). Resistance to the
various strategies of capitalist global restructuring -- capital's use of
oil price hikes, debt, structural adjustment, and war -- has occurred in
waves since the early 1980s (c.f., Midnight Notes, 1992, 1990). While each
cycle of struggle against austerity has forced changes in capitalist strategy,
still the main line of capitalist restructuring has proceeded.
To understand the EZLN and to place their politics requires some knowledge
of recent Mexican history.(2) Mexico has been a major focus for capital over the past
several decades. Indeed, the debt crisis was initially provoked by the Mexican
state's temporary refusal in 1982 to pay its debts to the world banking
system. Facing rising class struggle, the Mexican state quickly acceded
not only to pay the debt, but also to undergo structural adjustment. Mexican
wages plummeted as the value of the peso to the dollar was cut in half,
unemployment rose, and food subsidies and other forms of the social wage
were slashed, and the state increasingly opened Mexico to foreign capital
(see "Social Struggles in Mexico," Midnight Notes, 1988; Aboites,
this volume). Massive repression, from electoral fraud to death squads,
land evictions to smashing independent unions, were and are used to impose
austerity.
In 1992, the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) government amended
the constitution to eliminate communally owned land, the ejidos,
which formed a basis of subsistence for many indigenous people. Then, in
response to both struggles around the planet against capital's new enclosures
and to continued resistance by the Mexican working class, the Mexican state
joined with the World Bank to create PRONASOL, the National Program of Solidarity.
The rhetoric of Solidarity was to soften the blows of restructuring with
public works programs and to create an infrastructure for modernizing particularly
the poorest Mexican states in the south, including Chiapas, which received
the most funds. The money, was controlled by the PRI and used for such essential
modernizing projects as building new jails, as well as a source of funds
for party bosses to purchase loyalty.
Chiapas is the poorest Mexican state in terms of the incomes of its people,
but is fantastically wealthy. Electricity from its dams is sold even to
the U.S., while most Chiapanecans lack access to electricity. It rests on
a vast pool of mostly untapped oil, making control over the province vital
for capital. It exports beef, coffee, bananas, flowers and more, while many
of its people live on the edge of starvation. This poverty has propelled
intense class struggle, land seizures, and rural organizing. Even so, more
and more campesinos and indigenous people (various Mayan groups) have been
forced to ever-less-productive land, too poor for subsistence, making most
rurales dependent on a combination of what they can grow, what they
can market, and work for very low wages. (See "The Southeast in Two
Winds" in Zapatistas! (1994) and Collier (1994), for background.)
In 1994, a new stage of integrating Mexico into the globalized market was
implemented, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This agreement
has accelerated the immiseration of the Mexican working class.(3) NAFTA was expected
to further decrease the price of imported corn, the main staple crop grown
in Chiapas, and further promote enclosures and the control of land by large
ranchers and increasingly international agribusiness, urbanization, and
low-wage proletarianization.
From this deepening crisis of existence emerged the EZLN. The Zapatista
rebellion on the day NAFTA took effect shook the foundations of capitalist
planning in Mexico and signalled danger to the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). The ability of the EZLN to generate support in and
outside of Mexico forced the Mexican state to rein in its army and begin
negotiations that have continued on and off since January 1994, though suspended
by the EZLN on August 29, 1996 because the government has refused to implement
the agreements it signed on indigenous rights. The inability of the Mexican
state to eliminate the EZLN, together with resistance to austerity and the
state across Mexico, despite an inability of the left to unite, has combined
to deepen the crises of Mexican capital, the Mexican state, and the Mexican
working people. The current situation appears to be one in which the Mexican
state and capital are decomposing at a faster pace than the working class
can politically recompose itself, making for a fluid, dangerous and violent
situation (and a situation not unique to Mexico).
The roots of the EZLN are two-fold, the Mexican student movement of the
late 1960s and Mayan "original communism."(4) Subcommandante Marcos has explained that the students
left the city with the idea of creating guerrilla warfare and thereby mobilizing
the rural poor. But while they arrived seeing themselves as teachers and
leaders, they soon realized they must first become students and followers,
learning from the indigenous people. A new leadership emerged, combining
the ex-students with the communities and subordinating the military, the
EZLN, to control by the communities. It seems clear they have studied carefully
and learned from Mexican history, the struggles in Central America of the
past few decades, and the history of working class and indigenous struggles
of the past half millennium.
The result is a new political composition. It deserves analysis for at least
two major reasons: It appears as an effort to overcome previous limitations
of the left and of working class strategies and struggles; and it has acted
as a major roadblock in the path of capital's new enclosures (what the Zapatistas
have labelled neoliberalism) and could be part of provoking anew a crisis
of capital's ability to impose its forms of reconstruction.
In this piece, we will address the first of the two reasons. We also will
consider a number of tenets associated with the Zapatistas and other current
anti-capitalist efforts: localism, diversity, and networking. We conclude
with some modest proposals and suggestions that derive from our understanding
of the current situation, suggestions that we hope will further the development
of working class strategy against capitalism.
But before turning to that discussion, we first consider why it is that
the EZLN appears as a breakthrough by looking at the history of working
class, anti-capitalist struggle in the post-World War II era. It is precisely
because such struggles have reached a dead end and have failed to free humanity
from the domination of capital and its consequent immiseration that we must
renew the search for new political forms of resistance to capitalism and
proposals for post-capitalist society(ies).