III. Reflections on the Zapatistas' Strategy

The power of the EZLN to inspire and mobilize was highlighted when some 3000 people, including several Midnight Noters, trekked to Chiapas for the Intercontinental Encuentro against Neoliberalism and for Humanity, to engage in a week of deliberations (see Neill, "Encounters in Chiapas," this volume). This gathering has been labeled the International of Hope, a sign perhaps of the desperation of the anticapitalists in the face of the continuing onslaught of capitalist restructuring. But indeed the tone of the Encuentro was hopeful, the gathering enormously energizing and powerfully provocative for at least many who attended. Still, however valuable the inculcation of hope and energy, it does not absolve us of critical thought: what is it we can learn from the Zapatista experience?

The EZLN has relied in its writings on a number of key terms and ideas, all of which appear at first glance to be problematic: neoliberalism, civil society, Mexico, humanity. In brief, some concerns:

At the Encuentro, substantial time was spent describing and defining "neoliberalism," leading to complex documents representing compromises and embodying contradictions.
(8) As Caffentzis explains ("Many Names..," this volume), the term is one of many being used to describe the emerging shape of capitalism. The critical point is less which term ought to be used (Midnight Notes prefers "new enclosures"), but rather the political conceptions carried by the users of the term and whether those lead to analysis and practice that oppose capitalism fundamentally and comprehensively, not just some aspects of capitalism.

One danger in using the term is that in focusing on the current stage and strategy of capitalism, "neoliberalism," the essence, capitalism period, is possibly ignored. This can feed those who call for ameliorating the worst excesses of capital; people with such views were certainly present at the Encuentro. Yet, in practice, how much does this now matter? Little of the planet is not subject to neoliberalism as the guiding force. Will not in practice opposition to neoliberalism, regardless of the proclaimed ideology of the opponents, lead to new openings which, as always, can lead to a variety of paths? That is, can a planetary strategy against neoliberalism lead to a strategy against capitalism as a whole? Our conclusion is, yes, it can (more on this below).

In opposition to neoliberalism, the Zapatistas have posed, variously, civil society and humanity. These terms often have been used to avoid or oppose class analysis. We can look at them through a variety of lenses.

It has been argued, in and outside of Mexico, that the Zapatista uses of these terms signals the ideology of the popular front in a new guise. That is, it signals a multi-class strategy, and hence class compromise. Historically, the popular front has proposed an alliance of the workers, peasants, petit bourgeoisie, and even the democratic or patriotic elements of the large bourgeoisie (and some times "productive" versus "finance" or "speculative" capital) against, variously, fascism, the largest bourgeoisie, the comprador bourgeoisie, and the foreign imperialists.
(9) The consequences of the front have not been working class hegemony in a struggle that has overcome capitalism, but even when most successful (defeat of Nazis, social democracy in Western Europe, CCP victory in China) have led to the kinds of class deals discussed in the second section of this chapter. Thus, one could say of the EZLN that their strategy is simply one of a popular front to oppose NAFTA and related forms of structural adjustment and enclosures of the Mexican state, WB and IMF, in order to establish in Mexico a form of social democracy. Much of the EZLN rhetoric, proposals, and Revolutionary Law can be read this way quite easily (see Zapatistas!, 1994). It is, in short, impossible not to see in the EZLN's tactics and demands the apparent goal of some form of social democracy via popular front politics. To stop there, however, is to misread the evolution of the EZLN in the actual contexts of their struggle.

Use of terms such as civil society in Mexico is in part an effort to overcome a very narrow use of the term "working class" in the past, in which the latter term has typically been used to refer only to the factory proletariat. Midnight Notes has been part of the tradition that has attempted to retain use of the term working class in the context of understanding the social factory (c.f., Baldi, 1972). In Mexico, efforts to analyze the actual class composition have been developing. Thus, against those who would limit conception of the working class to a relatively narrow stratum of wage laborers (and ignore the unwaged, particularly women working at home), is the understanding that the working class really does encompass most of Mexican society; that most peasants and petit bourgeoisie and the unwaged and housewives are proletarians (see Neill, "Mexico, February 1995," this volume). It also requires recognizing that because the working population is fragmented, no one sector of the class represents the whole; that because it is fragmented hierarchically, capitalistically more powerful sectors of the class must be prevented by other sectors of the class from perpetuating their hierarchical advantages.

What is required then is a strategy to unite the various sectors of the working class against capital without reproducing capitalist hierarchy in the class. In this reading, then, we try to look past the instant labels to see an evolving process against the particular forms of capital that could lead to a more general movement against capital. This, too, is beginning to be discussed in Mexico. Rather than the traditional popular front, then, the EZLN may be developing a new means of conceptualizing through practice the working class.

The EZLN indeed includes the various sectors of the working class, including small owners, and even has some support from larger owners. As it includes different sectors, it includes the hierarchies and contradictions among those sectors, which in turn are reflected in the politics, language and Revolutionary Laws. But either it is recognized that these are contradictions within the class to be resolved over time in constructing new social relations (and therefore different than contradictions with international capital and its subsidiaries), or some class sectors must again propose a state apparatus to repress most all sectors. The EZLN has correctly rejected the latter project. The question is whether the attempt to politically compose the various sectors will reproduce the hierarchies within the class and thus feed capitalism or will enable the continued eradication of those hierarchies and thus feed the development of communism.

The discussion of whether to strategize the struggle as building a multi-class popular front or as finding ways to establish unity within a complex working class composition must also be situated in the context of neoliberalism and the new enclosures. That is, rather than understanding petty traders and micro-producers as petit-bourgeois, the current world structures of capitalism render these people proletarians in an complexly organized working class.

Politically, the success of a popular front under the leadership of "progressive" capitalism presumes the material possibility of an acceptable deal for the working class, or at least large segments of the class. Midnight Notes draws from the history of "Keynesianism" the lesson that capital knows it is not infinitely flexible, that social democracy is not sustainable. When capital is given the space in which to reform, it looks to get out of the deal because it sees in the deal its death. Scandinavia is neither generalizable nor sustainable. In the struggles of the working class against the post-War deals, capital saw zerowork and the tendency to the end of profit. As a result, after Keynesianism there is no "progressive" capitalism.
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Neoliberalism does offer a "deal." It offers to a percentage of the working class -- perhaps 20%; here more, there fewer (Reich, 1992) -- great material comfort -- homes, cars, travel, entertainment, servants -- and attendant social and psychological benefits. The 80% or more get Ricardo's "iron law" of wages -- bare subsistence. The deal offered is to accept the war of all against all to be part of the 20%, in which the 80% direct their efforts against each other, not the rule of capital. Compared with the deals of post-WWII, this hardly seems a deal at all.

Thus far, the response of the working class is not clear: strategies -- capitalist and non-capitalist, revolutionary and reformist, have not been articulated, though some lines of thought are developing (see Caffentzis, "Many Names..," this volume). While Midnight Notes concludes that no deals can be made with capital, many proposals for deals, non-revolutionary strategies, will emerge, grounded in such arguments as: it is impossible to get out of capitalism; it is the best we can do; it is too early; the class should not leave capital for some uncertain future (remember Stalin!).

As we stated at the opening of this piece, here the criterion we propose is whether the struggle moves the world's working class further against capitalism and toward communism. Since the key issue is movement against capitalism, not ideology, we need to examine where struggles appear to be going in the context of capitalism, not just ideology (c.f., Tronti, 1972). We think the Zapatistas are strategizing how to unite the 80% or more, and doing so in relationship to the existing and historical class composition in Mexico and in light of their understanding of global capital, in order to help overcome capital. In this context, and if it is correct that capital cannot now (for at least several generations) be other than neoliberal, then the actual Zapatista practice and strategy are indeed anti-capitalist.

The use of the language of patriotism by the EZLN needs also to be seen in this light. Nationalism, we argued in the first section, is one of the limitations of previous working class strategies; indeed, it is not clear that there can be a real nationalism that is not capitalist. What then to make of the calls to Mexican "true" patriotism against the sell-out comprador capitalists of the PRI, of the use of two gigantic Mexican flags to make the tent over the stage at the founding conference of the Zapatista-sponsored Convencion Nacional Democratica (CND), or even the names CND, EZLN, FZLN? Does not this nationalism play into the hands of a "patriotic" bourgeoisie (potentially the Zapatista leadership itself) that will just reassert a new version of a Mexican "social democracy," which in some ways the PRI institutionalized from the 1920s into the 1980s (see Aboites, this volume)? Or reinforce a Mexican nationalism that will return to oppress the Mayan people who have created the EZLN as one of many of their forms of opposition to Mexican and world capital?

In the long run, we continue to conclude nationalism is not a solution for the working class. But to get to the long run requires getting past the medium and short runs; that is, "patriotism" must be considered in light of particular strategies rooted in particular contexts (as also suggested by Aboites in the remarks earlier cited).

First, the possibility of the existence of a "patriotic bourgeoisie" in the context of neoliberalism and the new enclosures is virtually nil. Its last possible moment on the world stage was at the start of the debt crisis when the bourgeoisies of the various debtor nations could have created a debtors' cartel to attack the debt. They did not, because they feared their own working classes more than they did the IMF, with whom they could readily strike a deal to reorganize the exploitation of the working class. National capitals today not only are but must be instantly and thoroughly subordinate to world capital and the world market. Thus, while there may be national capitalist elements who would strive to use a patriotic popular front against the working class, in fact such a collection of capitalists have no room to maneuver against international capital and must necessarily rapidly betray their agreements with the working class. If this hypothesis is true, it will become steadily more apparent to the various sectors of the working class, forcing development of a deeper strategy against capital that precludes subservience to capitalist development.

Second, the path to overcome nationalism is in practice not easy to discern. Arguably, the Intercontinental Encuentro has been the boldest move to overcome nationalism seen since World War II -- indeed, it was billed not as an international but an intercontinental, referring therefore to geography not nations, never mind states. Still, the limitations of the strategies that came out of the Encuentro (see below on networks) suggest that in practice the most resolute of internationalists -- or more properly, planetarists -- have not yet learned how to act effectively against capital on a world level. Thus, to criticize all manifestations of nationalism, not just the manifestations now being employed by capitalist states to shore up their support as they capitulate to the IMF, is to leap ahead of any current political possibilities. Overcoming nationalism will require a long practice. For now, the EZLN appears to be offering a "patriotism of the 80%" as part of how they are attempting to organize the great majority from the bottom up against the ruling class, a patriotism that also supports autonomy for the indigenous.

Greek comrades have produced a document with some thoughtful critical analysis of the EZLN, particularly focusing on Zapatista nationalism (Katerina, 1995). Here we suggest that their view is filtered through the current situation of Greek nationalism directed by the capitalists against Macedonia and Albanians. While struggling to transcend nationalism, we need to understand its power within the working class as complex and contradictory and to understand that its manifestations may not support either world capitalism or local capitalists.

Let us briefly look at the Revolutionary Laws proclaimed in Chiapas in January 1994 (see Zapatistas! 1994, pp. 52-62). They have been correctly criticized as bourgeois law, as continuing to accept wages, capitalist concerns, private property. Here, too, however, we should look a bit deeper. These laws ought to be understood as a transitional set of laws. This is not only because a revolution is a process of change, but also because the laws themselves often are stated as being temporary.

The labor law proclaims that foreign companies must pay "what would be paid in dollars outside (Mexico)." Either they don't want foreign companies at all, or they are moving to equalize wages globally, furthering that long-standing proletarian strategy. Within Mexican companies, they seek to level wages by raising the bottom. Health care will be universally provided, a social welfare system and retirement benefits constructed. Most prisoners are freed, and the debts of the poor are canceled. Social democratic? Yes -- but in the Mexican context, quite revolutionary. Would it provide momentum and possibilities past the social democratic constructs? Perhaps, but that will depend substantially on what the working class in the rest of the world also can accomplish.

The Revolutionary Agrarian Law calls for expropriation of large private farms and related means of production. The land may then be farmed as smallholders or as cooperatives or communal lands. Production will be first for local consumption (rather than coffee or cattle for export), and secondly for supplemental exchange. While this law certainly allows for private farming, it encourages cooperative and communal farms by exempting them from taxation. Large agricultural businesses are to be run collectively by the workers, who are to be given stock shares in them. Again, these do not end capitalist production relations, but move toward doing so. The fundamental question here is about the social relations outside the production unit which will push those within the unit in one direction or another: will the various farms simply engage in competition with each other, worker-owned units in a capitalist economy, or are these steps in a process toward communism?
(11)

It seems to us in Midnight Notes that efforts to create vast "socialized" -- really, state-ized -- farms have generally been a disaster, not simply in terms of productivity, but because they have been resisted by the workers. These farms have historically been a means of proletarianizing rural laborers and small owners -- but we argue that the point of anti-capitalist revolution is to overcome the condition of being a proletarian, not to create proletarians. This argument does not mean that the EZLN has developed a strategy to accomplish this, only that they appear to have rejected the failed state farm/proletarianization strategy and are building on existing possibilities.

Another aspect of the way in which the law seeks to reduce hierarchy and overcome differences within the class is the promulgation of the Women's Revolutionary Law. These laws formally recognize the revolution against patriarchy within the class as a necessary part of the revolution against neoliberalism. These were promulgated in a society in which women often were denied elemental rights available to men. They are, in many ways, traditional socialist women's demands and in those ways limited. For example, the laws do not recognize that the predominantly women's work of raising children and reproducing labor power produces social wealth and should be remunerated.(12)

Whether such a strategy of radical reform as is suggested by the Revolutionary Laws will only temporarily ameliorate conditions before a resumption to the march of capitalism, or whether these are steps on a path leading out of capitalism will be decided in the course of the struggle. What we are arguing is the need to understand the Zapatistas as an anticapitalist strategy in process, in motion, within the contexts of Chiapas, of Mexico, and of the whole world. To take a set of demands, the Revolutionary Laws, as a fixed moment and as the desired end state, is to miss two essential points: that a revolution necessarily moves everyone involved, including the leadership, to new and unexpected places; and that the Zapatistas appear to understand this fact.

There is no purity in the Zapatista's methods, and thus methodological purists are appalled. It is indeed a mix of social democracy, Leninism, anarchism, central American and Mexican revolutionary traditions, what remains of indigenous communalism centuries after the Spanish conquest (and before that the Mayan states), and the long history of Mayan struggles against Mexico and against world capitalism. Just as capital uses all its history in reorganizing its structures to keep the working class divided, off balance, decomposed, the EZLN method proposes an evolving mix to bring the class together in progressively higher levels of unity against capital.

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that there are no principles behind the methodological mix. The EZLN has asserted foremost a radical participatory democracy. Thus, when an agreement was negotiated with the Mexican state in 1994, the agreement was submitted to the Zapatista communities for ratification and was rejected. It may be that the EZLN itself pushed for rejection of the deal it negotiated, but even so it seems clear that there was a widespread consultation. The EZLN has said it was not a decision of the military leadership to launch the January 1, 1994, assault, but a decision of the people. (Having seen Zapatista villages in Chiapas, it is readily clear that anyone who wishes to rejoin the state-PRI side can easily do so, and will likely be well-paid (albeit only briefly) for doing so.)

The meaning of this democracy shows up in several ways. First, the EZLN has chosen not to become a political party to contest for state power by elections, or to proclaim themselves a vanguard looking to seize the state. While they have created alliances with political parties, particularly with the social democratic PRD, it is probably most useful to understand these alliances in the context of attempting to construct a strategy that simultaneously increases the likelihood of survival of the EZLN, and more importantly the people and communities, and hastens the unity of 'civil society' against neoliberalism. The failure of the CND to accomplish this task led to the FZLN, a Front whose aim is to help develop anti-neoliberal unity. (Thus far, it seems that this effort too is not very successful, supporting the conclusion, noted above, that working class recomposition in Mexico is not proceeding faster than the decay and militarization of the Mexican state.)

The radical democratic solution can be seen also in the words of a letter from Marcos to the EPR, a guerrilla group which has a focoist conception of sparking revolution through its own military action. Said Marcos, "What we seek, what we need, is that all those people without a party and organization make agreements about what they want and do not want in order to become organized to achieve it (preferably through civil and peaceful means), not to take power, but to exercise it." It is clear that the EZLN does not know how to do this, but knows that the old methods have failed.

We read Marcos as saying that contrary to the long-established conception of the goal of the left as seizing state power in order to build "socialism" (and ultimately communism), the EZLN is proposing that people organize themselves to exercise power, that is, to live "socialism/communism" at least in political terms and in time economically. In doing so, we can conceive the "withering away" of the state as a process of class struggle through the self-organization of the working class, including the overcoming of its internal contradictions (such as hierarchy, race, gender). Rather than the free association of the producers being an end state, it is a current political activity of the working class against capital. The famous ends and means dichotomy is overcome because the means are the ends. "From the people [through the party] to the people," the Maoist line, ceases to have an intermediary party that is actually the state in embryo.

In a sense then, the fusion of Mexican Marxism and indigenous communism leads to a proposal to move directly to post-capitalist communism. This idea has been proposed before, for example by Amilcar Cabral (1969), who found that the most resolute anti-colonialist groups in Guinea-Bissau were those whose social structures and relations were the most communist and had the least hierarchy and lacked a state or state-in-embryo. The idea of an African road to socialism that built on communal land ownership and indigenous pre-capitalist social organizations was widely discussed in the 1960s and '70s. The sway of state socialism, however, was then too dominant for this road to be widely pursued in practice; now capital is working extremely hard to eliminate the possibility of Africans turning to that previously missed road.

The question of Mayan "original communism" has begun to spark debate about the extent of such communism and its meaning. Anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles in Chiapas and among indigenous people in Mexico have a history of half a millennium. These struggles cannot be reduced to the categories derived from the struggles of the European working class, including those that have developed further in Africa, Asia and Latin America. From outside, we can note the incorporation of that history, its categories and language, in the words of Marcos and other commandantes. But to those outside, this history is mostly unwritten and substantially invisible, though this is beginning to change (c.f., Burgos-Debray, 1984; Abya Yala News). Bringing together two substantially distinct histories of anti-capitalism opens ground for new theory and practice, making the potential struggle richer, but simultaneously posing new problems and complexities.

Interestingly, Marx himself was considering these issues (Rosemont, n.d.). After the fall of the Paris Commune, he turned his attention to a variety of issues, accumulated as the Ethnological Notebooks, in which he explored pre-capitalist social structures, including issues of gender (Raya Dunayevskaya used the Notebooks for a discussion of gender and the emergence of class society). Our point here is that Marx was exploring terrain and considering ideas that would appear to contradict "Marxism": that capitalism is progressive, that people around the world will have to undergo proletarianization in order to subsequently overcome capitalism, and that the working class created by capitalism is the sole source of positive anti-capitalism. He was thus exploring other means of understanding and attacking capitalism, and thus also undermining also his own Eurocentrism.

For those living in spaces far removed from the presence of indigenous people's original communism, the issue of the form or extent of such communism is, unlike for the EZLN, a far less immediately practical issue -- we apparently have no such social relations which could be a source of anti-capitalist power and of developing communism. We will have to search for and develop our struggles in other ways (a point to which we will return in section V.)

In any event, the creation of and movement toward post-capitalist communism cannot ignore the realities of the ways in which capitalism and other forms of exploitation and oppression have been ingrained within the working class, including indigenous people. The Zapatistas, like the rest of the world's working class, will have to figure out how to move ahead without recreating the capitalist past.

While the EZLN lacks a terminology that can be widely used (a widely shared problem) and has a strategy and practice with a messy methodology, looking beneath the surface appearances suggests two major points to learn from them:

-- At a time when efforts are underway to construct planetary networks for furthering anticapitalist struggles, anti-capitalist activists must be careful not to read their own particular histories of language or their own particular immediate struggles into the particularities of another history and space. That is not a call for uncritical acceptance, but for not one-sidedly using formal methodology or abstract categories, however accurately they may summarize historical class practice in general.

-- Radical participatory democracy -- which is not the democracy touted by the bourgeoisie -- is not simply a goal but a practice in politics, economics, and society. The EZLN appears to think that such practice can spread and in the process overcome old problematics on the left. Accepting this means accepting lots of impurity along the way. Giving up the apparent clarity of purity, which enables ready categorization, labeling, and often dismissal, revolutionaries are forced to wallow through the muck of religiosity, patriarchy, within-class hierarchy, nationalism, acceptance of small private property, and more, even while struggling against them (as Aboites also suggested, above). It also means rejecting the imposition of solutions to these old problems from above via the party and state -- everywhere this has been tried, it has failed. If the proletariat vomits out the revolutionary stew proposed by activists, no matter how pure the ingredients, the meal cannot be considered a success.

In studying the EZLN, we also think that a strategy against neoliberalism can open up a strategy against capitalism (using the term "neoliberalism" broadly and incorporating what Midnight Notes terms the "new enclosures"; Caffentzis, "Many Names..," this volume). On the one side, capitalism is itself trapped in neoliberalism; it is hard to see where it would attempt to create a deal based on working class security -- such a deal portends disaster for capital. On the other side, countering neoliberalism can bring together the now-fragmented sectors of the working class. Clearly there are dangers in this approach, and very many unresolved issues, some of which we will address in the next two sections of this piece.

Of course the EZLN itself may not succeed, even if they survive in the coming years the attacks of the Mexican state and international capital. Radical democracy may succumb to existing class hierarchies and not overcome contradictions in the class. It may falter in adaptation to an ever-larger scale. Still, we suggest the Zapatista practice should be seriously considered and learned from.

Finally, for this section, a reminder: the EZLN has not proposed themselves even as a model for Mexico, never mind the rest of the world. In the Encuentro they called, they did not tell the participants what to do. Indeed, the Zapatistas only rarely participated in the actual discussions. Rather, they provided a space for dialogue and thought. They sent, therefore, a message: think for yourselves, but let us also work together. The value in studying the Zapatista struggle is not for Zapatology, but to understand how they have thought through and developed a revolutionary project.

IV. Localism, Homogeneity, and Networks||Back to Home Page