Toward the New Commons:
Working Class Strategies and the Zapatistas (Excerpts)
by Monty Neill, with George Caffentzis and Johnny Machete, of the
Midnight Notes Collective
This paper is adapted from a much longer piece that will be
published by Midnight Notes, fall 1997. The full paper is now
available on the Web at:
<http://www.oocities.org/CapitolHill/3843/mngcjm.html>
The book can be ordered for US $10 (surface mail) from Midnight
Notes, Box 204, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130 USA. Monty Neill can be
reached at the P.O. Box or at <montyneill@aol.com>.
Summary. This piece opens by analyzing working class strategies
to transcend the class deals made with capital in the second half of
the twentieth century, particularly the struggle against work.. The
fatal flaws in those strategies were various divisions within the
working class, including hierarchy, racism, sexism/patriarchy,
nationalism, and work. Capital used these divisions to defeat the
working class and impose neoliberalism. The Zapatistas have spurred
new forms of thinking about how to overcome divisions and build new
forms of unity. However, networks alone will not be sufficient
against capital. Networks must lead to new forms of local and
planetary organization that assist the class to overcome its internal
divisions, particularly capital's imposition of work. These
organizations must simultaneously oppose capital and create new areas
of post-capitalist life that are both united and diverse.
I. Introduction: The Emergence of the Zapatistas;
For the three of us, the First Intercontinental Encuentro against
Neoliberalism and for Humanity, called by the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation (EZLN), was a moment of great political
rejuvenation. In the mountains of southeastern Mexico, in the
practice and ideas of the EZLN, we found not only hope and energy,
but also some important things to learn from: a break from a history
of working class struggles that had reached a dead end, and some
initiatives and practices from which we can learn to rethink working
class struggle at the planetary level.
This piece is an effort to begin that thinking, knowing we share
with others in the effort and that this piece is only a small start.
We hope it helps raise fundamental questions to help guide political
thinking in developing a new anti-capitalist, planetary movement.
Toward this end, we ask a few preliminary questions at the end of
each section. Midnight Notes is pleased to participate in the Second
Encuntro and hopes this piece and its questions will contribute
toward creation of a new, planetary commons for humanity.
II. Strategies and Deals
Strategies and deals are necessarily intertwined: a class deal is
a result of class struggle and thus of the degree of success of a
particular class strategy in the context of the material and social
possibilities of the time and place. On the basis of a deal, new
strategies are launched. The primary deals of the twentieth century,
between the working class and the various aspects of the capitalist
system, we can label social democracy or Keynesianism, Stalinist
socialism, and third world nationalist. Each deal was the result of a
working class struggle and each led to new working class strategies.
(Here we must explain that we use "working class" expansively,
including not only those whose payment takes the wage form, but also
those depended on other's wages (including the social wage), women
whose work is unwaged housework, and throughout the world the small
farmers and traders enclosed in dependent relations with capital;
most importantly, the working class defines itself through its
struggles against capital.).
In the Keynesian deal, the strategy rejected the deal of
relatively secure work in exchange for rising consumption to try to
impose a refusal of work: gaining the wage opens the possibility of
taking the money and then refusing the work, thus undermining the
accumulation of surplus value and the wages system. This produced
"stagflation" and a crisis of productivity and profits. In the
Stalinist deal, the refusal of work was summed up in a joke, "We
pretend to work, they pretend to pay us"; but in fact, workers were
paid, often in highly socialized ways, albeit by say US standards not
a high wage. The result in the Soviet bloc was rising wages (under
Brezhnev) and stagnation of accumulation. In the third world, the
demand was for development without the exploitation that everywhere
else attended development, the call was for socialism as
simultaneously accumulation and not working in ways that produced
profits. By the 1970s, stirrings of a resurgent "fourth world" or
indigenous peoples refusal was taking the form of attempting to opt
out of capitalist development, to refuse a work deal entirely, and
was rooted in traditions of "original" communism. Thus, everywhere,
based on the established deals, working class struggles combined,
through a circulation of struggles that formed a temporary political
homogeneity of the working class, to put the world capitalist system
into crisis.
Capital realized that the deals would have to be torn up, class
war launched in new ways. Since the early 1970s, capital has used
oil, debt, structural adjustment, technology, and military actions of
many kinds to attack all the old deals and decompose the political
homogeneity of the working class. The capitalist class has been
fundamentally successful in this effort, although several cycles of
resistance to structural adjustment have caused capital to pause and
reconfigure its attacks. The attacks and new structures have been
variously labeled, including "neoliberalism," "new international
division of labor," "globalization," and what we in Midnight Notes
term "new enclosures." (See our "Midnight Oil," Autonomedia, 1992).
But why was capital successful in breaking the political unity of
the working class, both around the planet and in different locales?
Each of the strategies and each of the deals shared similar flaws,
though they manifested in different particulars. We choose here to
mention hierarchy within the class, racism, sexism/patriarchy,
nationalism, and work. Each of these was a division in the class
imperfectly overcome and thus susceptible to capitalist attack in
which the division would be the basis of a reshaped, more powerful
division organized for capital's benefit. The divisions within the
class we discuss here are not the only ones -- sexual orientation,
disabilities -- various forms of "otherness" -- often become moments
of division.
(A) Hierarchy in the class, by which we mean divisions of wages,
of security of employment, of status within the working class, is a
fundamental product of and necessity for capital. Across nations, it
can take the form of support for imperialism.
(B) Racism is a hierarchy in the class. Nothing has been or
continues to be a more powerful form of division in the US working
class than racism. On a world scale, it is the racism of imperial
conquest, and following that racism toward immigrants from the
historically subordinated areas, a racism now virulently visible
across "Fortress Europe" as well as the US. In the "third world,"
racism also contributes to dividing the working class, as in racism
against the indigenous in Latin America.
(C) Patriarchy and sexism: The sexual division of labor, a
fundamental form of division, has been available for capitalist
re-creation and manipulation from capitalism's birth. As Wages for
Housework made clear, the unwaged status of women's work has been the
material basis for unwaged work elsewhere in the system and for lower
wages paid to women, and it provides the floor for the wages system
-- all work, no pay. By and large, the strategies of the working
class prior to the post-1960's crises did not address the
exploitation of women rooted in lack of social payment for their
work, thus ensuring the continued subordination of women and
perpetuating a fundamental division within the class.
(D) Nationalism has been a tool for capital to divide the working
class. Discussion of the nation-state in light of the failures of
nationalism as socialism necessarily raises two fundamental issues.
One is the consequences of centuries of imperialism, of development
and underdevelopment, which are two necessary and complementary
aspects of world capitalism. The second, related question is that of
the workers' state: can such a thing exist? If nationalism presumes a
state, then nationalism is necessarily not working class. However, it
may not necessarily be the case that "nation" must presume "state."
On all this, the working class faces an unresolved problem bound up
with not having solved the question of the transition from capitalism
to communism. The working class must find a non-state form of
social-economic-political organization, and part of its conception
must involve overcoming the legacy of underdevelopment.
(E) Class defensive organizations and work, or the relationship
between working class strategies and the role of unions, parties and
states around the question of work: While workers launched a powerful
struggle against work in the first world in the 1960s, the unions,
parties and states defended the regime of work. Around the world,
similar activities under highly similar social relations were merely
renamed, from exploitation to "contribution to socialism," or as the
worker's "contribution" to the expanding pie of wealth in which
workers would get their "fair slice" (and hence supposedly were not
exploited), or as "nation building." Is it possible for the
instruments of arranging a deal with capital to ever play a useful
role against capital, to be both defensive and offensive, to make and
undermine and transcend the deals? It remains probable that such
organizations are needed, but the question of how the working class
can actually create these organizations is not known. It is likely
that any such organization will not be able to survive in such a
precarious and self-contradictory state for long: it is possible when
on the offensive, but if a new fundamental deal between capital and
working class is organized, the organization will at a minimum
splinter over its two roles -- mediating the deal and struggling to
surpass the deal.
We summarize these lessons with caution. We cannot and should not
simply lay these historical conclusions rigidly over a struggle, such
as the Zapatistas, to evaluate that struggle. To the contrary, every
struggle must simultaneously be understood in its own contextual
evolution as well as in light of lessons we can try to learn from the
history of class struggle.
A concluding question: What kinds of demands and struggles do not
reassert divisions within the class, but instead build greater unity
by overcoming divisions?
III. Reflections on the Zapatistas' Strategy.
[We begin this section by discussing a number of key terms and
ideas presented by the Zapatistas, all of which appear at first
glance to be problematic: neoliberalism, civil society, Mexico,
humanity.]
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. This can be seen in the
words of a letter from Marcos to the EPR: "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 raised before, for example by Amilcar
Cabral 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.
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. 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.
Finally for this section, there is the question of whether a
strategy against "neoliberalism" -- that is, against the currently
dominant class relation comprising capitalism -- is an effective
strategy against capitalism. We think so. 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 based on the history of the ways
in which the working class used the deals against capital. On the
other side, countering neoliberalism can bring together the
now-fragmented sectors of the working class. However, in this process
there are dangers. One is a reformist conception aiming towards some
new form, perhaps "green" and ostensibly more local, of social
democracy, that is an anti-neoliberalism that fails to confront
capital; the other is a reassertion, in the face of neoliberalism and
neo-social democracy, of Leninism. These approaches are doomed to
fail (in terms of overcoming capital), which is part of why we think
struggling against neoliberalism is a plausible strategy, but these
approaches can undermine and confuse struggles against capital.
Questions: Is methodological impurity simply a confusion of
different class perspectives, or a necessary combining of the
fragments of divided humanity to create a successful post- capitalism
for humanity? How can the anti-capitalism of various planetary
experiences successfully come together?
IV. Localism, Homogeneity, and Networks
Capital most certainly will not allow development of a localism
outside of capital, contrary to the ideas and hopes of some. The law
of value operates with more, not less, rigor, even where it appears
most absent; that is, capital depends on labor that is apparently
"outside" of capital as part of the accumulation process.
While we conclude from the histories of "real" socialism and
"market" capitalism that local control is substantially desirable,
the goal of localism cannot be left as a political possibility
independent of the means to defend it on a world scale. Unless the
working class develops means whereby all local resistances are
connected against capital, the locals will not succeed and the rule
of capital will not be abolished. The working class does not yet know
how to accomplish these possibly contradictory tasks of local and
planetary revolution and so must learn. Further, given the effects of
five centuries of capitalist development and underdevelopment and the
resulting organization of production, massive changes are needed in
production and distribution of whatever humans decide ought to be
produced. These changes cannot be carried through on a purely local
basis. These necessarily large-scale and coordinated processes,
however, cannot take the form of the state, that is of a body rising
above society that serves finally to perpetuate the exploitation of
working people. New versions of social democracy are not adequate to
the tasks of combatting neoliberalism or building new societies.
The construction of hierarchical difference within the working
class, resting on the division of labor, is essential to capital,
because without difference capital cannot obtain work from the
working class. On the cultural terrain capital demands homogeneity
(of a marketable and controllable variety), while economically it
constructs difference and hierarchy, and socially it perpetuates
race, gender and other divisions. From the proletarian side come the
demands for cultural variety, "authenticity," while rejecting race
and gender hierarchy and calling for leveling of wages and wealth
(homogeneity). The environmentalist arguments for biodiversity, and
the linguists awareness of the richness of linguistic diversity,
reinforce the social desirability of real cultural diversity. Thus,
the working class on a planetary level needs diversity to keep itself
alive as a class against capital, but it must become homogenous with
respect to capital, thereby creating entropy, decay and death for
capital.
Hopefully, through the networking and the dialogues and debates,
practices and thinking both successful and unsuccessful will be
analyzed and developed in ways that will lead to incremental gains in
unity of thinking and action, and then the greater leaps to unified,
widespread cycles of struggle. The acts of getting together and doing
together enables a shared humanness that can help break down
divisions in the class. The posing of the network as the means of
political development suggests simultaneously that non-centralized
but coordinated activity is itself a goal and that the planetary
working class cannot yet see how to act in a more unified manner.
Thus, the network is both an end and a means of developing a more
coherent strategy (which does not imply that the goal is a
centralized decision-making apparatus).
Parallel to the Leninist or social democratic emulation of the
capitalist factory, we might also consider the network's relationship
to emerging capitalist structures. The capitalists now claim that the
market solves everything. Clearly this is not so -- the capitalists
organize themselves as a class, through the institutions of the
military and police, as well as in the structures of the market, to
guarantee their market, their class rule, their accumulation.
"Networking" may be a left version of accepting the market, creating
the danger of presuming that "the network" will do it all. This is no
more true for the working class than for capital. The lesson to be
learned here from Leninism and social democracy is to not construct
organizations against capital that reproduce capital; but the class
also should not construct non-organizations that parallel capitalist
illusions.
In the "information age," it is all to easy to be deluged with
information. This is not helpful unless the information is well
organized for some use -- which only raises the question, who will
organize the information? The EZLN and its supporters have been
marvelously inventive in using networks, but multiply Chiapas by even
10, never mind the thousands needed: how many channels can the mind
consider? This is not the individual's problem. Sorting information
requires political collectivity. It implies calculated division of
labor and aspects of centralization: someone else will decide for you
(presumably with your consent) what reaches you and what is the most
important information. It also poses the related problem: what
struggles deserve what attention, and who decides?
Networks, particularly if they are highly dependent on computer
connections (e.g., the internet), also reflect class composition
within capitalism. India has something like one telephone per 100
inhabitants. Who will get on the internet? Those favored by the
international foundations or the NGOs or the World Bank? What happens
to the class composition of the discussion?
This issue re-poses the problem of hierarchy -- of race, gender,
nation, work, wages -- within the class. Will the networks simply
reproduce those hierarchies? How, beyond any subjective desires of
network participants (a valuable and necessary ingredient), can
networks be used to overcome these hierarchies when their very use
reproduces them?
Thus, networking does not in itself resolve the question of how
the working class is to organize itself. While we reject traditional
centralism, we are unpersuaded that networked localisms will in
themselves be able to overcome capitalism: something more, beyond any
existing conceptions or practice of networks, will have to develop
out of the struggles -- both for overcoming capitalism and for
establishing communism. We are pleased that the second Encuentro has
placed these issues at the center of its work.
Question: How can networks actually lead to successfuly working
unity against capital?
V. Class Composition and Developing a New Working Class Strategy
The traditions from which Midnight Notes comes suggest that if
analysis and theory is to be useful for developing a class strategy
in practice, we need to analyze and theorize the dynamically changing
class composition on a world scale, looking for the material and
social bases of anti-capitalism and post-capitalism; that is, to do a
class composition analysis -- not to locate a new vanguard, but to
help the many class sectors come together. [In the full text, what
follows here is a critique of the theory of class composition.]
We might envision capital as a global power grid overlaid on a
vast nebula, with the planetary working class as that nebula. Workers
are captured by and in some ways defined by the grid. That is the
sphere of exploitation. However, the nebula is life: capital must
draw on it and cannot survive without it, but the workers have life
and can survive without the grid. This is the sphere of everyday
life, however corrupted and channeled by capital -- but no matter how
controlling, capital cannot be everyday life. Everyday life thus
remains a great reservoir of energy against capital. This is in some
ways more visible when, as with the Zapatistas, everyday life
incorporates social structures and relations that pre-date capital
and have visible anti-capitalist potential. But such potential is
everywhere -- though being everywhere is no guarantee it will be
mobilized against capital.
This is another way of saying that capital depends on the life
energy of the working class -- but that life energy cannot be reduced
to capital nor fully possessed by capital. It is the space outside of
capital, the space of human life not defined by capital, that is the
fundamental source of power against capital as well as the basic
source of capital itself. That is, working class struggles
necessarily come also from outside the working class' existence as
working class and thus move not only within the circuits of capital
but also extend or create spaces outside of capitalist circuits.
Working class struggles, therefore, cannot be reduced to only those
in the ostensible realm of the "economy," to issues of production and
wages, but are also social struggles. The goal of struggle is to
create humanity by extending humanity: controlling means of
production, reducing and altering work, defining new modes of
ownership and distribution, developing participatory democratic
processes and structures, etc., etc., are all for this purpose as
well as reasonable ends in themselves.
Capital has from its start sought to enclose the commons, from
colonization to slavery, from the work day to the home, from activity
to the deepest thoughts and feelings, the history of capital is its
extension into the human commons. In fighting what we in Midnight
Notes term the "new enclosures," the working class is not simply
seeking to defend what human commons remains from the past or what
commons was created under variants of twentieth- century socialism,
but also to reassert, redefine, and extend the commons.
While the working class commons-ist movement must create its
future through its struggles, including its creation of new social
structures, it is also true that glimmerings and ideas of the future,
of what is desirable and what could be made, continuously infuse
struggles and provide some sense of a goal, and part of the struggle
is thinking about and developing those possibilities. If life is
anti-capitalist, then social struggles asserting life and human
dignity and autonomous space and time, have anti-capitalist energy,
aspects and possibilities. The working class cannot beat capital only
with resistance and opposition -- both are needed, resistance and
construction, or what P.M. termed "substruction" (bolo'bolo). The
class must keep in mind Marx' observation that the new society
emerges from the womb of the old and try to protect and hasten the
development of the embryo.
Elements of post-capitalism exist in many places. Most will be
isolated or absorbed, sometimes smashed but mostly used as fuel for
accumulation -- capital always seeks to channel human energy and
struggle into its productivity. This does not mean we should simply
dismiss them: their limitations speak to the limitations of the
overall class struggle. The class must locate and build on all its
non- and anti-capitalist aspects. These include both the ways in
which struggles such as strikes develop post-capitalist relationships
and the efforts to deliberately construct alternative institutions or
relationships within the larger current society. Taken by themselves,
each is inadequate to the task of overcoming capitalism. Daily life
may be non- and anti-capitalist, but not raised to organized
struggle, and organized struggles may fail to be anti-capitalist.
In its struggles, the EZLN looks in part to pre-capitalist
communalism of the indigenous people. The point is not to repeat the
Zapatistas, or to select one historical strategy and argue for it,
but to learn to create new proletarian combinations. While not all
sectors can look directly to a living continuation of the social
structures of original communism, all sectors can find their
non-capitalist spaces and build further on them.
In this section we have perhaps taken a turn towards poetics --
nebulae and humanity. We confess this is not simply a love of
metaphor, but because we are in a stage of developing new strategies,
and we cannot yet see what those strategies will really look like. So
we turn to asserting some fundamental principles, in addition to
trying to analyze the contradictions within the class that undermine
the success of the class, as a starting point toward developing new
struggles and new strategies.
Question: How can "many yeses" form a unity sufficient to go
beyond just saying "no" to capital and create a planetary society
both united and diverse? What kinds of organizational forms will make
unity with diversity successful against capital?
VI. Conclusions (taken from various sections of the full piece).
In analyzing the history of class struggle, crisis and capitalist
offensive since the 1960s, only parts of which we addressed above, we
conclude that to be successful, a struggle against capital and its
regime of work and accumulation requires at least the following:
1) a growing sense of unity of a world proletariat: that such a
proletariat does exist (contra post-ism) and that "we" are all in it
together;
2) a high degree of overcoming of class hierarchy, of divisions of
wages, gender, race and nation: where insufficient, these are all
moments of capitalist decomposition of proletarian unity;
3) a means of subsistence: capital's control over production means
it can starve the working class (note that "encircling the cities"
and "alternative production" both propose solutions to this problem);
4) a means of defense, whether from armies or death penalties or
prisons: if they can kill workers with impunity, the working class
cannot sustain its gains;
5) a sense of an alternative, non-capitalist possibility: the
idea that another world can exist and can be created ("commons-ism"
or "communism"), though that world does not presume uniformity,
indeed will support great diversity.
The heart of capitalism is creating a working class, producing
workers and social relations conducive to work for capital. The
struggle against work is clearly a struggle against surplus value as
the alienated product of labor used to support a ruling class and
ensure expanded exploitation and capitalist social relations. It is
also a struggle against unnecessary expenditure of human labor in
producing use-values, against producing use-values of use only within
the social construct of capital. It is about the reorganization of
time so that "work" is not reduced to inhuman efficiency but so human
relations define work, not the other way around. And it about is
changing the relations and values that dominate society. Thus, the
fundamental questions of the economy are social and political, not
"economic," and this true both within capitalism and after capitalism
as the working class creates a new commons.
Under capital, work, be it waged in the factory or office,
unwaged in home or school or prison, indirectly waged in small
farming and selling, is the antithesis of the commons, however much
capital fosters cooperation to spur production. Human relations
remain within and outside these circuits, but capital deforms and
channels them.
From these observations, we can draw several conclusions. First,
the struggle against capital and for humanity exists in all social
relations and circuits. Thus a strategy must consider the
relationships among all the circuits and how to strengthen them
against capital. Second, since the essence of capital is the creation
of work, the struggle against work must be understood as central.
This struggle is centuries, millennia, old, predates capital and
continues throughout capitalism.
The defeat of working class strategies that sought to overcome
the socialist deals of the twentieth century through the struggle
against work does not signal the end of the struggle against work.
Rather, it signals that the working class must rethink itself and
recreate itself through struggles. The struggle against work, and
thus against all forms of exploitative hierarchies within the class,
circulates through all the circuits of life in and outside of
capital, resisting capital and creating new social forms within
capital. It is the struggle for the commons.
We do not yet know how a developing analysis can be useful or
what strategies the working class will develop to further its own
political recomposition against capital and to transcend capital. We
are, however, arguing for deliberate impurity of method, for
listening to the particulars of struggles to hear both the
anti-capitalism and the post-capitalism (commons-ism or communism)
that might exist, for pushing to make all kinds of new circuits of
struggle.
To move ahead, we suggest some basic work. We recognize some of
it is now being done, perhaps much of it, as networks of
communication slowly develop -- and we expect this effort to move
ahead during and after the Second Encuentro, just as the First
Encuentro proposed the possibility again of planetary anti-capitalist
activity.
1) Exchanging knowledge (not just "information") about how new
class political recompositions are emerging or trying to emerge in
particular struggles.
2) Proposing strategies as to how such emerging recompositions can
themselves deepen or can interact with other class forces in mutually
reinforcing ways. This involves listening to and watching the
struggles, but also participating in them.
3) Carefully analyzing how such recompositions or suggested
strategies might be levelling existing class hierarchies or
capitalist relations within the working class, and doing so to push
and prod each of us past the narrowness and limitations we
necessarily have as products of a capitalist world division of labor.
4) Using analysis of capital's strategies and development to
suggest cautions the working class should heed; by learning from
struggles, we might help each other avoid capitalist traps.
5) Strengthening an analysis of capital that actually helps in
figuring out its weaknesses and how best to attack it.
6) Figuring out forms of immediate political organization that
can utilize their own division of labor without reproducing
internally a capitalistic division. Since it seems highly evident
that no one person can keep up even in a cursory manner with all the
aspects of struggle, sharing that work though political organizations
is necessary, as is developing supportive and cooperative relations
among many organizations.
7) Developing new political language, so we can actually
communicate within the diversity of experiences and languages of the
class.
In the future, things will unfold that we have not conceived.
Working class struggle is in a process of discovery. Class
composition analysis suggests that the working class composes itself,
makes and transcends itself, through struggle. The class now is
decomposed, fragmented, much defeated. The class must find ways to
make itself whole; not homogenous, but united. We conclude that the
Zapatistas, with whatever limitations, and however uncertain their
own immediate future, have given us some hope and some wisdom and
have sparked new energy and creativity. We thus have a better
possibility of navigating across and out of the desert of capitalism
and into the time and space of a new commons.