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. (10)
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.