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DRAFT – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE

From the Lacandon Jungle to Zucotti Park: The Zapatistas and Anti-Capitalist Politics in a ‘Post-Communist’ Age

By Christopher Gunderson

But while I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name — while I pondered all this, John Ball began to speak again in the same soft and dear voice with which he had left off.

William Morris (2008)A Dream of John Ball

Zapatismo was not Marxism-Leninism, but it also was Marxism-Leninism, it wasn’t the Marxism of the university, it wasn’t the Marxism of concrete analysis, it wasn’t the history of Mexico, it wasn’t fundamentalist and millennialist indigenous thought, it wasn’t indigenous resistance: it was a mix of all this, a cocktail that was mixed in the mountains and that crystalized in the fighting force of the EZLN, that is to say among the regular troops. The regular troops, the insurgents, us, Major Mario, Captain Maribel, Major Ana Maria, those that had spent all this time in the mountains, we are the final product of this collision of cultures. And all the compañeros of the Committee that had spent the most time, like Tacho, David, Zevedeo, compañeros that were there from the start, who had been in the Zapatista National Liberation Army for 10, 12 years, and who by their work were the leaders of the movement, began to produce their own definition of what Zapatismo is.

SubComanadante Insurgente Marcos(LeBot 1997:198–201)

Several months into the Occupy Wall Street protests that swept the United States in the

Fall of 2011, social critic and former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges wrote in a column

for Truthdig.com that

The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state.

DRAFT -- DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE -- Gunderson 2

The article provoked an energetic debate within and around the Occupy movement about the role

of the Black Bloc and the value of the tactical repertoire described by Hedges. In the course of

making his case, Hedges remarked that

Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems.

Hedges article prompted a response in n+1 from David Graeber, an anarchist and

anthropologist who played an important role in launching Occupy Wall Street. Graeber wrote

Your comment about Black Bloc’ers hating the Zapatistas is one of the weirdest I’ve ever seen. Sure, if you dig around, you can find someone saying almost anything. But I’m guessing that, despite the ideological diversity [of the Black Bloc], if you took a poll of participants in the average Black Bloc and asked what political movement in the world inspired them the most, the EZLN would get about 80% of the vote. In fact I’d be willing to wager that at least a third of participants in the average Black Bloc are wearing or carrying at least one item of Zapatista paraphernalia.

The dispute over the merits and demerits of the tactics of the Black Bloc is beyond the

scope of this paper. What makes this exchange noteworthy I think is the invocation of the

Zapatistas by both sides in the dispute. Whatever else they may disagree on, both Hedges and

Graeber are eager to align their position with the Zapatistas. 18 years after the Ejercito Zapatista

de Liberación Nacional’s January 1, 1994 uprising in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, the

Mayan Indian rebel army remains an important point of reference for contemporary social

movement actors around the world.


In this paper I consider the implications of the influence of Zapatismo on the international

anti-capitalist left over the past twenty years. I begin by briefly discussing the extent of that

impact. I then discuss the place of the idea of “communism” within the social sciences generally,

and within the study of social movements and contentious politics in particular, suggesting that

Zapatismo’s global resonance can not be understood without reference to communism in terms

largely excluded from social movement theory. I proceed to give a narrative account of the

origins of the EZLN, the course of the 1994 uprising and major subsequent developments

through 1996. Next I consider the specific political content of Zapatismo as articulated in the

official statements and communiques of the EZLN during this period. I then briefly discuss the

main course of events involving the Zapatistas from 1996 to the present. Finally I argue, in light

of the narrative presented, that it was precisely because Zapatismo in fact represented a

revitalization of the idea of communism at a moment when even the name of communism had

been made effectively unspeakable that it encountered the global resonance that it did.

This study has its roots in my own involvement with the Zapatistas. In 1996, after two

years of involvement in activism in solidarity with the Zapatistas I travelled to Chiapas to

participate in the First Intercontinental Encuentro Against Neoliberalism and For Humanity. A

year later I relocated to Chiapas where I spent the better part of the next two years working on

the construction of a medical clinic, located just outside the village of Benito Juarez-Miramar,

intended to serve a dozen Zapatista villages in the heart of the Lacandon Jungle. I was also able

to visit many other villages, either accompanying friends working on various other material aid

projects or acting as a human rights observer during a wave of Mexican Army incursions into

Zapatista villages following the December 22, 1997 massacre of 45 men, women and children in

the highland village of Acteal. I returned to the United States in 1999, but made short visits to


Chiapas in 2000 and 2006, and beginning in 2008 I spent a year conducting interviews and

archival research for my doctoral thesis on the political and intellectual origins and development

of Zapatismo prior to the 1994 uprising. This paper is a substantive revision of sections of my

dissertation in which I seek to establish the continuing political importance of Zapatismo and

discuss its relationship to communism.

The Global Resonance of Zapatismo

Twenty years after their decision to go to war, and still confined to a corner of southern

Mexico, the Zapatistas remain an important point of reference for contemporary social

movement actors around the world. Why is this and does it have any larger significance? The

Zapatista uprising, I will argue, initiated a global reconstitution of the anti-capitalist left at a

moment following the Tiananmen Square massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the subsequent

disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the US victory in the First Gulf War, when socialism and

communism seemed permanently discredited and the neo-liberal model promoted globally by the

US seemed unassailable. The Zapatista uprising was able to do this, I will argue, because the

Zapatistas both articulated a radical critique of capitalism in its latest neo-liberal phase and

demonstrated creatively and concretely the possibilities of forms of resistance that appeared to

avoid the statist and authoritarian pitfalls associated with the apparently exhausted forms of both

Leninist and social democratic political parties.

The Zapatistas gave the atomized and demoralized forces of the left a new language and

new techniques that were taken up in turn first by the international Zapatista solidarity network

that emerged almost instantaneously following the 1994 uprising, then in the wave of major

alter-globalization protests from 1998 to 2001, next in the organization of the World Social


Forums, and most recently in the global wave of uprisings initiated by the Arab Spring. While

each of these phases in the development of global anti-capitalism has had its own character and

been informed by a variety of influences, I am arguing that the Zapatistas played a particularly

important role by initiating this new sequence and articulating a core set of political values and

organizational practices that have defined it. While many of these values and practices can be

traced in turn to earlier movements – Spanish anarchism, the student New Left of the 1960s, and

the feminist wave of the 1970s – and these undoubtedly influenced the reception of the

Zapatistas, it was the Zapatista uprising that articulated them into the particular more or less

coherent core of a new post-Cold War anti-capitalist politics that finally obtained a genuinely

mass character in the United States with the eruption of the Occupy movement.

The radical movements that have emerged in the period following the Zapatista uprising

have largely eschewed the language of socialism and communism, instead identifying negatively

as “anti-capitalist.” Which is to say that they have so far not yet cohered around any particular

positive vision of an alternative to capitalism as much as on its rejection.

The Zapatista uprising, I am arguing, is what the French philosopher Alain Badiou

describes as an “event,” a rupture that initiates a new sequence based on fidelity to the event and

that is only revealed by the development of that sequence. It represented a genuinely new

articulation of what Badiou has called “the communist hypothesis” and it is precisely because of

its communist content, I am arguing, that it was able to catalyze a reconstitution of a radical anti-

capitalist left.

When the Zapatistas announced their existence to the world, what most immediately and

obviously distinguished them from other Latin American guerrilla groups was precisely the

absence of the familiar language of the revolutionary left – the language of vanguard parties, of


the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the seizure of state power, of socialism and communism. If

a few lower-ranking figures went off-message in the first days of the uprising, the charisma and

literary talents of SubComandante Marcos quickly focused attention back on the EZLN’s

demands for “freedom, justice and democracy,” on their appeals for support, not to workers and

campesinos, but to “civil society,” and on their repudiation of the pursuit of state power. If the

EZLN’s first public proclamations, The Declaration of War and The Revolutionary Laws, were

actually largely in keeping with the discourse of Marxist-Leninist led national liberation

movements in Latin America and elsewhere, the poetry of the communiques that followed made

it easy to forget this. At a moment when the language of socialism and communism felt

completely exhausted from carrying the weight of soul-crushing bureaucracies and apologetics

for massacres, the Zapatistas offered the scattered and demoralized forces of the radical left, not

just in Mexico but around the world, a seemingly fresh new way to talk, to think and to represent

itself.

It was not a small thing. The international Zapatista solidarity network that arose in the

wake of the 1994 uprising played a critical role in crystalizing the alter-globalization movement

that emerged in the late 1990s. More recently, many of the central and distinctive ideas and

practices that alter-globalization activists took from their reading of Zapatismo have returned on

a much larger scale in the Arab Spring, the movement of the plazas in southern Europe, in

Occupy Wall Street in the United States, and in other movements that have been part of the

global wave of social struggles that erupted in 2011. If the direct Zapatista influence is less

visibly evident in Cairo than in Madrid, Rome or Santiago, that should not distract our attention

from the important role that the Zapatista uprising played in initiating a new global sequence of

mass democratic and sometimes more and sometime less explicitly anti-capitalist struggle at an


historical moment when what Badiou called the “saturation” of the sequence initiated by the

Russian Revolution made such a thing look impossible.

Communism after “Communism.”

If the Zapatista uprising appeared on first glance to distinguish itself precisely by its

distance from the discourse and practices associated with the term “communism,” I am arguing

that in retrospect it now appears to actually mark the beginning of a global rebirth of communist

politics. From the vantage point of 1994, the fall of the Berlin Wall and related events in 1989

appeared as the end of a terminal crisis that had plagued the communist movement for at least

several decades. By the 1990s, triumphalist neo-liberals and demoralized leftists alike

acknowledged the obvious death of “communism.”

The Zapatista uprising thus came as a great surprise, not just because it had been prepared

in secret, but more profoundly because it seemed to defy the unambiguous direction of history.

The dramatic reappearance of the literal “wretched of the earth,” organized into a ragtag army

and demanding “todo para todos, para nostros nada,” on the very evening that neo-liberal elites

were toasting the implementation of NAFTA, was not following the script. Indeed, it even came

as shock to those in the Diocese of San Cristóbal and in the Mexican security and intelligence

apparatus, who knew very well that it was going to happen, but who nonetheless utterly failed to

anticipate its scale, much less its global significance. This blindness to what was, in retrospect,

right in front of their noses, can not simply be attributed to the Zapatistas success in keeping their

secrets. Rather it reflected the fact that both the Diocese and the Mexican state were, in their own

quite distinct ways, in the process of accommodating themselves to what everyone was certain

was a post-communist world.


This sense that the Zapatista uprising was defying history deeply informed how the

uprising and the Zapatistas came to be understood by both their sympathizers and their critics.

For their sympathizers it meant that Zapatismo had to be understood as something entirely new

and expressive of new conditions. To whatever degree it had to be acknowledged to have a

history, it was a history that culminated precisely in a rupture with the exhausted politics of

communism identified with the history of the short 20th century that had ended in 1989. Indeed

this view would be taken up to an important degree by the Zapatistas themselves, especially in

statements by Subcomandante Marcos.

In the eyes of the Zapatistas’ critics, it was precisely the EZLN’s actual roots in the

communist movement that, appearances of novelty notwithstanding, made them a relic, another

tragic example, as it were, of the persistent backwardness of Chiapas. In this view the uprising

represented a clinging to an exhausted formula and as such, a dead end.

If these two perspectives produced seemingly opposing verdicts on the EZLN, they both

partook of the view that something called communism was dead. From the vantage point of

2012, and with the benefit of the much more detailed account of the actual genesis of the

Zapatistas’ politics, I am arguing that this reading is no longer sustainable. The revived

philosophical interest in the idea of communism occasioned by the publication and reception of

Badiou’s The Communist Hypothesis (Badiou 2008, 2010) has prompted an intellectual debate

on whether the term can become again the name of an emancipatory politics. The very fact of the

debate, however, suggests that it already has, if only yet in spectral form. For the generation

raised since 1989, the menacing shadow of Soviet tanks no longer looms as it once did over any

attempt to make real the possible better worlds. If most of the participants in the current wave of

struggle remain reluctant to revive the term, the voices of reaction have not. The lurid and absurd


accusations of communist sympathies directed at candidate and then president Barack Obama by

Glenn Beck, and the recent, and no less surreal, charges of Florida Congressman Allen West that

there are at least 80 communists in Congress, can not help but recall the words from the preface

of the Manifesto,

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? (Marx and Engels 2006:2)

As the Manifesto proceeds to argue, this fact means that “Communism is already acknowledged

… to be itself a power.” In 2012, as in 1848, the revival of anti-communist political discourse is

a response to a threat that largely does yet know itself to exist. And to the extent that it does

know itself to exist I am suggesting that its self-awareness can be traced in significant measure to

the Zapatista uprising as the moment when dispersed forces began to recrystalize and the

communist movement reappeared under a new name. Zapatismo itself, I will also argue is the

product of a creative synthesis of several partial expressions, in Chiapas and in Mexico, of

communism as understood in Marx’s words as “the real movement which abolishes the present

state of things.” This synthesis emerged in the context of a deep theoretical and practical crisis in

the communist movement on a world scale around the relationship between revolutionary

leadership and mass democracy that by the 1990s had resulted in the saturation or exhaustion of

the sequence of socialist revolutions initiated in 1917.

In this part I discuss the difficulties that the academic study of contentious politics has

had theorizing the role of revolutionary thought, and in particular in dealing with the idea of

communism. I argue that there is an entrenched resistance in the scholarly literature to

recognizing the theoretical potency of communism as a real force in human affairs and that this

is a major obstacle especially to the development of a comprehensive theoretical framework for


understanding anti-systemic social movements, social revolutions and related forms of

contentious politics. I then argue that without an understanding of communism as Marx

understood it, and the broader theoretical framework such an understanding enables, that most of

the scholarship on contentious politics will, the best intentions of sympathetic scholars

notwithstanding, continue to be of marginal value to the movements themselves.

A number of theories of contentious politics recognize the critical role that cultures of

resistance and processes of cognitive liberation play in the formation of social movement actors

as political subjects. In their definition of protest movements, Piven and Cloward describe the

process of cognitive liberation:

The emergence of protest movements entails a transformation both of consciousness and of behavior. The change in consciousness has at least three distinct aspects. First, “the system” – or those aspects of the system that people experience and perceive – loses legitimacy. Large numbers of men and women who ordinarily accept the authority of their rulers and the legitimacy of institutional arrangements come to believe in some measure that these rulers and these arrangements are unjust and wrong. Second, people who are ordinarily fatalistic, who believe that existing arrangements are inevitable, begin to assert “rights” that imply demands for change. Third, there is a new sense of efficacy; people who ordinarily consider themselves helpless come to believe that they have some capacity to alter their lot. (Piven and Cloward 1978:3–4)

They continue with a description of the change in behavior, noting first the element of defiance,

and secondly its collective character, even in instances that appear to be individual in character,

“when those involved perceive themselves to be acting as members of a group, and when they

share a common set of protest beliefs.”

This emphasis on the central importance of the transformation of consciousness in the

emergence of social movements was a challenge not only to theories of collective behavior

which cast the motivations of movement participants as irrational, but also to theories of resource

mobilization that emphasized the conscious intentions of formalized social movement


organizations and in the process excluded from analysis many of the most defiant forms of

protest precisely because they occurred outside of the actions of formal organizations.

McAdam (1999:48–51) significantly modified the resource mobilization paradigm by

adopting and adapting Piven and Cloward’s notion of cognitive liberation, which he

characterizes as “the crucial intervening process” that transforms the “structural potential”

generated by the combination of “indigenous organizational strength” with “expanding political

opportunities” into “actual insurgency.” In the resulting political process model of social

movement emergence, the process of cognitive liberation is set in motion by “cuings among

groups of people who jointly create the meanings they will read into current and anticipated

events.” These cuings are in turn prompted by socio-economic transformations but are only

likely to produce the necessary phenomena of cognitive liberation where “existent organizations

afford insurgents the stable group-settings within which that process is most likely to occur.”

Similarly, working in the comparative historical sociology of revolutions, Foran

identifies what he calls “political cultures of opposition” (2005:21) as a necessary pre-condition

for the emergence of a serious revolutionary movement.

All of these are examples of efforts to restore the role of conscious agential action to

accounts of contentious politics. Still there persists a striking resistance to a serious theoretical

engagement with the specific content of the explicitly stated ideological orientations of

movement actors, especially where that content is consciously or unconsciously communist, as it

very often is. In all of these models (and in others) political ideology is viewed ultimately in

functional or instrumental terms. That is to say as a necessary condition or mechanism for the

emergence of movements. So long as certain elementary conditions are fulfilled, for example


that it facilitate the three aspects of cognitive liberation identified by Piven and Cloward,

ideological positions are viewed as more or less interchangeable.

Indeed, for the purpose of explaining the simple fact of the emergence of an insurgency,

this is entirely justified. Whether the frame is Musteyite, Baptist or Maoist, so long as it

facilitates the delegitimation of established powers and arrangements, challenges the belief that

those arrangements are inevitable, and encourages a group of people to believe in their own

capacity to effect change, any ideology can provide the meaning necessary to transform

“structural potential” into “actual insurgency.” But as soon as we try to account for why a

particular movement embraces or develops a particular political orientation among various

options, or seek to understand debates and choices between diverse forces within movements, the

resistance to engaging the specific theoretical content of movement ideologies becomes a serious

obstacle.

This resistance can express itself in a variety of ways. One of these is simply a

presumptively cynical view of the motivations of revolutionary leaderships. There is a sort of

popular Cold War-era common sense that the leaders of revolutionary movements are largely

intellectuals whose opportunities under a particular regime have been thwarted and who

consequently seek to ride the discontent of the lower classes to power. Sometimes, as in the case

of Wickham Crowley, this is advanced explicitly. More often it is an implicit assumption, as in

the case of the anti-Zapatistas views of the FLN.

Another form this resistance sometimes takes is a privileging of local or “autonomous”

movements as objects of study and an instinctive skepticism of national political parties or

organizations which are regarded chiefly as threats to the autonomy of local forces. Judith Adler


Hellman (1992:52–61) deftly dissects this tendency in the study of Latin American social

movements, criticizing what she calls “the anti-organizational bias” of

those who are pleased and excited by the spontaneity of isolated grass-roots movements and dismayed when these autonomous movements link up with others in a stronger, far better organized and coordinated political coalition.

Hellman goes on to note that

[t]his bias may simply reflect deep suspicions about the inevitability of bureaucratization in centralized organizations—even those that do not correspond to a Leninist model. Certainly, concern about bureaucratization has been a common theme for the European Left since the beginning of the century when Roberto Michels first formalized the problem as the “iron law of oligarchy.”(1992:56)

Sometimes taking cover under a misreading of Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect,”

this Michelsian view is seductive in its realism. In so far as it denies, however, the possibility of

any enduring organizational expression of the collective subjectivity of the oppressed it

implicitly accepts the permanence of capitalism and the impossibility of its actual supersession

and must be understood as an essentially ideological stance.

As Buechler has argued, the study of social movements has become satisfied with the

perpetual production of ever more refined theories of the middle range. These theories describe

with impressive precision a whole array of mechanisms that supposedly account for the various

dynamic of movements, but that are notoriously unsatisfying as explanations to anyone who has

actually dedicated themselves to such movements.

It is permissible within the social scientific study of contentious politics to critique

capitalism. It is permissible to study and even sympathize with movements that identify to one

degree or another, as anti-capitalist. It is permissible to celebrate their acts of resistance,

subversion and their construction of autonomous spaces within capitalism. What is effectively

marginalized, what is largely excluded from the scholarship on contentious politics is any serious


consideration of movements as the varied theoretical and practical expressions of “the real

movement which abolishes the present state of things,” or as the process through which

humanity realizes, in Marx’s terms, its “species being.” Communism is not treated as a serious

theoretical category or concept, but only as the name of an instrumental ideology of party and

state elites and apparatuses. Individual communists may be recognized as leading particular

popular movements. But their communism is not to be taken as expressive of anything other than

either their individual political predilections or the instrumental machinations of their respective

parties.

This narrow understanding of communism as nothing more than the name of an ideology

effectively obstructs the development of a comprehensive theoretical framework for

understanding the underlying common dynamics animating anti-systemic social movements,

social revolutions and related forms of contentious politics and as consequence their actual role

the process of human social development.

In the face of the capitalist world system’s deepening financial, ecological, and political

crises, and the desperate hunger of huge swathes of humanity for an alternative as expressed in

the upheavals of the past year, this resistance to the question of communism needs to be

challenged. If radical scholars working within academia are to fulfill their intellectual

responsibilities to people in struggle we need to be able to think and speak clearly about those

struggles as part of the real movement to supersede capitalism. This has already begun to occur

in Philosophy in the work of Badiou, Zizek, Buck-Morss and others. It needs to now be taken up

by radicals working in the more empirical social or human sciences.

Badiou has called “the communist hypothesis.” (2008:34-35) which he defines as

follows,


In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class – the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity – is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.

‘Communism’ as such denotes only this very general set of intellectual representations. It is what Kant called an Idea, with a regulatory function, rather than a programme. It is foolish to call such communist principles utopian; in the sense that I have defined them here they are intellectual patterns, always actualized in a different fashion. As a pure Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since the beginnings of the state. As soon as mass action opposes state coercion in the name of egalitarian justice, rudiments or fragments of the hypothesis start to appear. Popular revolts—the slaves led by Spartacus, the peasants led by Müntzer—might be identified as practical examples of this ‘communist invariant.’

The fragments of the hypothesis, Badiou suggests, can only be gathered together into a

whole with the consolidation of the capitalist world system. For the first time in history by both

bringing virtually the whole of humanity into sustained intercourse and producing the sort of

surpluses necessary to make a world without want practicable, I would add, communism is

transformed from its fragmentary form into a force, if not yet a self-conscious one, in human

affairs. In The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850 Marx specifically contrasts this notion of

communism with what he calls the “utopian doctrinaire socialism”

which at bottom only idealizes present society, takes a picture of it without shadows, and wants to achieve its ideal athwart the realities of present society; while the proletariat surrenders this socialism to the petty bourgeoisie; while the struggle of the different socialist leaders among themselves sets forth each of the so-called systems as a pretentious adherence to one of the transit points of the social revolution as against another – the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary socialism, around communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations. (1993:122–123)


The emergence and expansion of the world market as a defining feature of the modern

world system, with its logic of accumulation and the corresponding constant revolutionizing of

technology and social organization, thus raises for the first time in human history the possibility

of a radically new way of life, no longer characterized by alienated labor nor governed by the

capitalist law of value. It is this possibility, and the evident fact of its non-realization, I am

arguing, which comes to inform, consciously or not, all contemporary forms of political

contention beginning with the revolutionary upheavals of the late 18th century. So, while the

dream of “a world turned upside down” is arguably as old as class society itself, it is “with the

French Revolution,” as Badiou explains, (and with it, the Haitian, I would add) that “the

communist hypothesis then inaugurates the epoch of political modernity.” (Badiou 2008)

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Karl Marx, The German Ideology

This is not to argue that communism isn’t also the name of the official ideologies of

socialist and communist states and parties. Those states and parties, and their respective

ideologies are, in fact, also products of the real movement towards communism. But their

relationship to the real movement is complex and contradictory and in need of critical

deconstruction. This study is, in part, a contribution to that deconstruction. The establishment of

socialist states and political parties and mass organization aligned to various degrees with those

states, has been profoundly contradictory. During the short 20th century, the resources available

to the Soviet Union and other socialist states radically altered the balance of forces between

popular movements and capitalist states on a world scale. The social, economic and political


conquests of workers movements in the 20th century and the post-war decolonization of Asia and

Africa, while certainly not reducible to epiphenomena of socialism, obtained considerable

momentum from both the socialist revolutions that gave rise to socialist states and from the

actions of states themselves. Less widely recognized is the similar impetus given to changes in

the status of women and even the emergence of the LGBT movement.

At the same time, of course, the resultant subordination of the communist movement to

considerations of state which were not themselves expressions of the movement was a source of

serious distortions in the development of the movement. Here again, however, it is important to

understand the disputes within and between socialist and communist parties and states, as well as

within and between party and non-party forces within movements as expressions of a struggle

with the persistent re-emergence of capitalist forces and relations within the communist

movement itself. These are all questions that a theory of contentious politics that takes

communism as an objective, as well as subjective, force in human affairs will have to address.

Zapatismo is, I am arguing, an expression of the global development of communism as

“the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Sociology and the other

institutionalized social sciences have quite happily appropriated to themselves much of Marx’s

critical analysis of capitalism, integrating it into a methodology that remains still largely

positivist. What has been, for the most part, left to the side, as if it were some sort of indigestible

piece of gristle, is Marx’s understanding of communism, which is judged to be either too

normative or too speculative to have any place in serious social science.

If, however, as Buroway suggests, Marxism still functions as a progressive scientific

research program, I would argue that the idea of communism must be regarded as a critical

component of its hard core of assumptions, not as an extraneous element that can be discarded


while leaving the rest intact. Its proof is not direct, but is expressed rather in its continuing status

as a progressive, rather than a degenerating research program.

Communism is not, as Marx argues, an ideal in the minds of a group of people. It is

rather an objectively existing movement that arises “from the premises now in existence,” that is

to say from the premises of the modern capitalist world system that first began to take form in

the 16th century. If it first expresses itself unconsciously in seemingly spontaneous outbreaks of

revolt, it strives from the start to become conscious of itself, because it is only as it becomes

conscious that it become realizable. Revolutionary theory in general, and Marxism in particular,

are thus a continuously evolving product of this striving. It is nourished by the real struggles of

oppressed peoples against their oppression, and its development is driven first and foremost by

the problems posed in the course of those struggles.

Revolutionary theory does not arise, however, out of some abstract general global state of

affairs. It arises rather under various particular local circumstances which are themselves

expressions of the uneven character of capitalist development and which inevitably mark it.

Marxism didn’t just happen to be born in the 19th century Europe. It was a response to processes

of development within a European-centered capitalist world system, in particular the appearance

for the first time anywhere of the figure of the industrial proletariat and its then still quite

primitive and spasmodic revolts against the not yet fully consolidate rule of the bourgeoisie.

The subsequent development of revolutionary theory, which is to say of the self-

consciousness of the actually existing communist movement, consists of a series of greater and

lesser modifications of the core ideas developed by Marx and Engels, in the face of

contradictions arising in the course of actual revolutionary struggles. These modifications are not

simply adjustments to new circumstances and different national settings, but also responses to a


continuous process of drift as the organized expression of the movement (in leagues, parties,

fronts and so on) are inevitably subjected to the reifying influence of daily existence in bourgeois

society. In theoretical terms this influence has historically expressed itself in the forms of

determinism, positivism, economism and opportunism.

The challenge facing each fresh revolutionary outbreak, then, is for it to correctly identify

and digest what is universal in the accumulated lessons of previous movements, while also

recognizing not only what is particular and therefore perhaps not applicable in other

circumstances, but also what is an expression of the dominant ideology.

This pursuit of theoretical clarification occurs primarily through processes of ideological

struggle, that is to say in the concrete competition between more or less developed intellectual

leadership groups for the consciousness of particular larger social groups. As such it also always

has its own cultural specificity which is to say that it occurs within a particular cultural context

characterized by its own dynamics. If we accept Geertz’s notion of ideologies as cultural systems

that arise in response to the failure of traditional cultural systems we should be able to also

understand that the ideological struggles that have characterized the whole process of the

development of revolutionary theory have also always occurred within the context of

disintegrating, but still influential, traditional cultural systems.

Roots of a Rebellion

In the 1970s, eastern Chiapas saw the emergence of a vibrant indigenous campesino

movement that fought for land and demanded political rights and improved social conditions for

the state’s impoverished and despised indigenous communities. Supported by the pastoral staff

of the Catholic Diocese of San Cristóbal and advised by the urban university-educated cadres of


several radical left-wing organizations (in particular two Maoist organizations, Unión del Pueblo

and Línea Proletaria) the communities built several large independent campesino organizations.

Based in village and regional popular assemblies, this movement challenged the power of the

state’s land-owning elite by seizing lands and defying the authority of the ruling Partido

Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI). By 1983, however, the

movement was in disarray as a result of violent state repression and sharp internal conflicts over

the way forward. Advisers from the largest Maoist organization, Línea Proletaria, argued against

more land takeovers and for a strategy of alliances with factions within the PRI to secure

financial support for projects intended to increase economic productivity, while leaders of many

of the indigenous communities and a fraction of the pastoral staff of the Diocese were looking to

the insurgent movements in Central America as a model for more thoroughgoing revolutionary

change.

On November 17, 1983, five men and one woman established a guerrilla encampment on

Chuncerro Mountain in the heart of the Lacandon Jungle in Chiapas, Mexico and declared the

formation of the EZLN. All were members of the Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (National

Liberation Forces or FLN), a clandestine political-military organization founded in 1969 in the

northern Mexican city of Monterey that had made several previous abortive attempts to establish

a guerrilla nucleus in the Lacandon Jungle. Three were Tzotzil Indians recruited in the northern

part of the state and the other three were, in the racial argot that Chiapas inherited from

Guatemala, ladinos, or as they would have been called by the Indians, caxlanes, non-indigenous.

Over the next several years a large fraction of the indigenous campesino movement,

particularly in the Cañadas (canyons) region of the Lacandon Jungle, would join the EZLN

which was transformed from a tiny guerrilla nucleus into a force of several thousand armed


combatants. By the early 1990s frustrations in the indigenous communities were reaching a

boiling point. The elimination of price supports for coffee had devastated many communities.

The revision of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, which had served as the basis of land

reform policies since the Mexican Revolution, threatened pending title claims by thousands of

families, particularly in the Cañadas region of the Lacandon Jungle. Provisions of the North

American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) set to go into effect on January 1, 1994 threatened to

flood the Mexican market with cheap subsidized U.S. corn that would ruin already struggling

campesinos in Chiapas. It was not without reason that Subcomandante Marcos would describe

NAFTA as “a death sentence” on the Indians of Chiapas.

The Uprising

The Zapatista uprising began in the early morning hours of New Years Day, 1994 with

the capture of the cities of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, and Ocosingo and the towns of Las

Margaritas, Altamirano and Chanal, all municipal seats in the central highlands and eastern

lowlands of Chiapas by the forces of the EZLN. The towns of Huixtan, Oxchuc, Chalam,

Simojovel and San Andres Larráinzar would also fall to the rebels that day. The Zapatista forces

were composed of several thousand poorly armed milicianos and a smaller number of better

armed and trained insurgentes, recruited almost exclusively from the four Mayan Indian ethnic

groups – the Tzotziles, Tzeltales, Choles and Tojolabales – that are concentrated in the eastern

half of the state. The events of the uprising have been recounted many times. In the abbreviated

account below I rely on Bartolomé (1995), Ceceña et al. (1995), the collected reportage of La

Jornada (1996), Muñoz Ramírez (2003); Pérez Ruíz (2005) and Henck.(2007)


In the days that followed, the Zapatista forces retreated from the cities and towns that

they had captured, and were pursued and attacked by the Mexican Army. News of the aerial

bombardment of poor Indian neighborhoods around the old colonial capital of San Cristóbal and

images of young Indians, armed only with wooden replicas of rifles, shot down in the streets of

Ocosingo, or summarily executed with their hands bound behind their backs, galvanized both

Mexican and international sympathy for the rebels which quickly took the form of a giant wave

of protest demonstrations demanding an end to the fighting and acceptance of the rebels’ call for

ceasefire and dialogue. By January 12, Mexican President Carlos Salinas announced a ceasefire,

which the Zapatistas accepted on January 18, opening the way for talks between the rebels and

the government. Thus, after roughly two weeks of fighting, a previously unknown rebel group

was able to force the government of Mexico to sit down and discuss its demands.

The first round of talks began on February 21 in the Cathedral of the Catholic Diocese of

San Cristobal with Bishop Samuel Ruíz serving as mediator. On March 1, the representative of

the government presented the Zapatistas with a 32-point offer in response to their demands,

which the Zapatista delegation in turn promised to take back to their communities for a

consultation or consulta. The consulta ended on May 30 and on June 10 the Zapatista’s issued

the results, a resounding rejection of the government’s offer as inadequate for its refusal to take

up the national demands of the Zapatistas for constitutional reforms to guarantee free and fair

elections, the restoration of land reform provisions gutted in 1992, and the rights of indigenous

communities.

The rejection of the government’s offer came as Mexico was preparing to elect a new

president and Chiapas a new governor. The Zapatistas supported the campaign of Amador

Avendaño, publisher of Tiempo, running for the governorship of Chiapas under the banner of the


center-left Partido Revolucionario Democratico (Revolutionary Democratic Party or PRD).

When the PRI candidate was declared the winner, the Zapatistas denounced the gubernatorial

elections as fraudulent and supported Avendaño’s formation of a parallel state government “in

rebellion.” On October 12, the Democratic Assembly of the People of the State of Chiapas

(AEDPCH), a broad coalition composed mainly of campesino and indigenous organizations and

aligned with the EZLN, declared the creation of nine Regiones Plurietnicas Autonomos

(Pluriethnic Autonomous Regions or RAPs), essentially autonomous municipal governments that

would support the rebel state government.

Two months later, on December 19, the EZLN announced that its units had passed

through Mexican army lines and taken up positions in 38 municipalities composing the eastern

half of the state, and declared the formation of thirty autonomous municipalities on top of the

nine RAPs declared in October.

The Zapatistas’ actions greatly upset foreign holders of short-term Mexican bonds,

contributing to an abrupt devaluation of the peso which in turn sharpened the already serious

political crisis facing the government. On February 9, 1995 Salinas’s successor, President

Ernesto Zedillo announced the issuance of arrest warrants for Marcos, revealed to be a former

philosophy instructor, Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente and several other alleged non-

indigenous Zapatista “comandantes.” The warrants would serve as a pretext for a short-lived

military offensive against the Zapatistas. The military offensive, however, quickly backfired and,

after massive national and international protests, Zedillo was forced to call it off after only five

days, and shortly thereafter to sign the Law for Dialogue, Reconciliation and a Dignified Peace

in Chiapas that granted the Zapatistas amnesty and empowered a newly created Commission of


Concord and Pacification (COCOPA), composed of representatives of the five parties in the

Congress, to facilitate future talks between the government and the Zapatistas.

The talks began again on April 10, 1995 with a focus on the question of indigenous rights

and the Zapatistas used them very effectively to put the government on the political defensive.

On February 16, 1996 the Zapatistas and the government would sign the San Andres Accords on

Indigenous Rights and Culture.

Elements of Zapatismo

In the weeks, months and years that followed the January 1, 1994 Zapatista uprising in

Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatistas progressively articulated and attempted to put into practice a

new and distinctive form of radical politics – Zapatismo – a that appeared to break sharply with

the dominant theory and practice of the international revolutionary left over the course of the 20th

century. The Zapatistas were heralded by the emerging alter-globalization movement as the

embodiment of a new radical anti-capitalist politics that rejected the vanguardist claims of

Leninist parties and refused the pursuit of state power. Indeed, the Zapatista uprising and the

Zapatistas themselves played an important role in encouraging the emergence of the alter-

globalization movement and their ideas and organizational forms and practices were widely

viewed as a model within that movement. To understand this influence it is necessary to take a

closer look at their ideas.

The defining and distinctive features of Zapatismo were all largely articulated in

declarations and communiqués over the period beginning with the 1994 uprising and concluding

with the signing of the San Andres Accords. This is, accordingly, a good point to interrupt the

narrative and discuss the distinct content of Zapatismo as it was articulated in these documents.


While Zapatismo’s most distinctive features are not present in the Declaration of War

(later known as The First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle) and the Revolutionary Laws

(EZLN 1994:33–48) issued at the outbreak of the uprising, these documents nonetheless express

important core commitments of the EZLN that are sometimes ignored by their international

sympathizers. The First Declaration is a short document that presents a justification for the

uprising and declares the EZLN’s immediate intentions to march on Mexico City, topple the

dictatorship of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and to install a “free and

democratic” government. The First Declaration very clearly defines the Zapatistas’ fight as a

popular struggle for national liberation from foreign (presumably primarily U.S.) domination

exercised through the PRI and locates that struggle in the larger sweep of Mexican history:

We are a product of 500 years of struggle: first against slavery, then during the War of Independence against Spain led by insurgents, then to avoid being absorbed by North American imperialism, then to promulgate our constitution and expel the French empire from our soil, and later the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz denied us the just application of the Reform laws and the people rebelled and leaders like Villa and Zapata emerged, poor men just like us. We have been denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health care, no food nor education. Nor are we able to freely and democratically elect our political representatives, nor is there independence from foreigners, nor is there peace nor justice for ourselves and our children.

Today, we say ENOUGH. We are the inheritors of the true builders of our nation. The dispossessed, we are millions and we thereby call upon our brothers and sisters to join this struggle as the only path, so that we will not die of hunger due to the insatiable ambition of a 70 year dictatorship led by a clique of traitors that represent the most conservative and sell-out groups. They are the same ones that opposed Hidalgo and Morelos, the same ones that betrayed Vicente Guerrero, the same ones that sold half our country to the foreign invader, the same ones that imported a European prince to rule our country, the same ones that formed the “scientific” Porfirsta dictatorship, the same ones that opposed the Petroleum Expropriation, the same ones that massacred the railroad workers in 1958 and the students in 1968, the same ones that today take everything from us, absolutely everything. (EZLN 1994:33)


The legitimacy of the uprising is further affirmed by invoking Article 39 of the Mexican

Constitution:

National Sovereignty essentially and originally resides in the people. All political power emanates from the people and its purpose is to help the people. The people have, at all times, the inalienable right to alter or modify their form of government.

Finally, the popular and revolutionary character of the Zapatista uprising is condensed in their 11

one-word demands:

work, land, housing, food, healthcare, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace.

With the subsequent inclusion of “culture” and “information” this list would be enlarged to 13

demands. If the demands stand out for their brevity, a number of them were effectively

elaborated in greater detail in the Revolutionary Laws. The Revolutionary Laws address an

assortment of questions including: the rights of women, tenants, and workers; the regulation of

industry and commerce, agrarian reform, and the administration of justice.

While the First Declaration and the Revolutionary Laws carefully avoid any specific

reference to socialism, their language is entirely consistent with that of a socialist-led struggle for

national liberation and its more orthodox style has been frequently contrasted with that of later

statements from the EZLN. It is also noteworthy that there is not a single direct mention in the

First Declaration or in the Revolutionary Laws of the indigenous character of the EZLN, nor is

there any reference to the question of indigenous rights or autonomy.

It is worth noting here that while the conceptual apparatus of these initial documents has

been considerably expanded and that while the ceasefire and talks with the government rendered

certain portions effectively moot, that the EZLN has never repudiated the fundamental

conception of their struggle as a popular one for national liberation and that indeed this

conception has been consistently and repeatedly reaffirmed over the years. It is important to


emphasize this point precisely because it is a feature of Zapatismo that is often de-emphasized or

ignored by the Zapatistas international sympathizers in the alter-globalization movement but that

has actually been quite critical to the EZLN’s capacity to command broad support in Mexico.

In Otra Formas de Lucha (Other Forms of Struggle) (EZLN 1994:102) the CCRI-GC

recognizes the decisive role of street protests, media work and other forms of action in producing

the ceasefire and insists that they do not regard armed struggle as the only legitimate form of

struggle or see themselves as the only legitimate revolutionary force or organization in the

country. While insisting that they resorted to arms only after being denied any other means, in

this communiqué the Zapatistas begin to articulate a strategy of mobilizing a broad

“revolutionary national movement” that can contain “diverse tendencies … different thoughts,

distinct forms of struggle, but where there is only one longing and one goal: freedom,

democracy, and justice.”

Another key communiqué issued several weeks later, Mandar Obedeciendo (To Lead

Obeying) (EZLN 1994:175–177) demanded that President Carlos Salinas and the governors of

the Mexican states resign, that new and democratic elections be organized under a transitional

government and that these be monitored by non-partisan citizens organizations. The real

importance of this communiqué, however, was to be found in its suggestion of the Zapatistas’

distinctive vision of democracy and the role of leadership. Presented with a mytho-poetic

solemnity that would become one of several distinctive voices employed in Zapatista

communiques, this vision has several elements. The first is a critique of the few who rule

“without obeying the will of the many.” In contrast with this method of rule, which is attributed

to the government, the “truthful faceless men” of the EZLN uphold the principles that while the


majority should rule that minorities must not be silenced, and that the hearts of those who would

lead must become able to obey and act according to the will of the majority.

The concept of mandar obedeciendo is arguably the key distinguishing feature of

Zapatismo. Its implications would be continuously elaborated in subsequent communiqués and

statements. It proved to be a very potent rhetorical weapon in the hands of the Zapatistas, so

much so that Mexican politicians started sprinkling the term into speeches. In essence it refers to

a method of political leadership and governance that takes seriously and is fundamentally

accountable to the people. The term is deliberately paradoxical and as such recognizes an

inherent tension between democracy and political leadership, and, without denying the

importance of the latter, insists on its ultimate subordination to the former.

The concept of mandar obedeciendo would underpin all subsequent Zapatista critiques of

the anti-democratic character of the Mexican state, their fundamental distrust of all political

parties, their style of leadership in relation to the broad Zapatista solidarity movement that was

emerging nationally and internationally, and in the organization of the autonomous structures of

self-governance within and between the Zapatista communities.

A fourth major innovation was contained in a communiqué entitled El inicio de diálogo

(The beginning of the dialogue) (EZLN 1994:155–156) which uses the phrase “Para todos todo,

[…] para nosotros nada” – “Everything for everybody, [… ] for ourselves nothing.” This

signaled both the radicalism of the Zapatistas’ objectives and that the leaders of the EZLN would

not be looking out for themselves, or even primarily the interests of the Zapatista communities,

in the talks, but would rather be seeking the resolution of national issues that they regarded as

deeper structural causes of the communities grievances and, furthermore, that they would

actively refuse attempts to corrupt or co-opt them. This was not simply empty posturing. In the


years that followed, Zapatista communities would consistently refuse all sorts of assistance

offered by the government, which, in the absence of fulfillment of a negotiated settlement, they

regarded as attempted bribes. This policy would contribute significantly to strains within

Zapatista communities that would, in some instances, lead to fractions of, or even whole

communities, leaving the ranks of the organization. At the same time, the refusal of any benefit

for themselves gave the Zapatista’s claim to advance national demands greater moral and

political weight and strongly reinforced the notion of a leadership that viewed itself as

subordinate to the larger aspirations of the people. In light of the ruling party’s long history of

successfully coopting popular challenges to its rule this explicit stance won the Zapatistas broad

respect among people with good reason to distrust the revolutionary posturing of caudillos. It is

also I would like to suggest an important indication of the ultimately communist content of the

Zapatistas program.

Another distinguishing feature of Zapatismo would be its critical analysis of neo-

liberalism as a new and distinct phase of capitalism that could only be effectively confronted

with a new radical politics. While the Zapatistas identified their main enemy as the PRI party-

state that had ruled Mexico since the end of the Mexican Revolution, it was the PRI’s more

recent embrace of neo-liberal policies of austerity, privatization, and most importantly, the end of

land reform signaled by the revision of Article 27 of the Mexican constitution, that constituted

their final and worst betrayal of the Revolution. While foreshadowed in several of Marcos’s

stories about Durito (a talking pipe-smoking beetle who plays Don Quixote to Marcos’s Sancho

Panza) (EZLN 1996:256–268, 314–322, 413–419) the Zapatistas critique of neo-liberalism

would be articulated most clearly in The Seven Loose Pieces of the Global Jigsaw Puzzle (EZLN


2003:47–72) which characterizes neo-liberalism as a “Fourth World War” waged by trans-

national financial capital against the peoples of the world.

The final feature that would characterize and distinguish the politics of the EZLN

concerned their conception of the culture, rights and status of indigenous peoples within Mexico.

As noted previously these themes were absent from both the First Declaration of the Lacandon

Jungle and the Revolutionary Laws. While the meaning of this absence has been debated it seems

clear that the EZLN’s own precise position on these questions emerged largely in the aftermath

of the 1994 uprising, was importantly informed by their newfound role as leaders of Mexico’s

national indigenous movement, and achieved its clearest and most forceful articulation in the

course of the talks that led ultimately to the signing of the San Andres Accords in 1996. (Vera

Herrera and Hernández Navarro 1998) At the heart of the Zapatista position on indigenous

rights and autonomy is a view of Mexico as a multi-ethnic society in which the recognition of the

collective rights of indigenous peoples – to communicate in their own languages and cultures, to

freedom from discrimination, to govern themselves autonomously, to control resources and

direct their own economic development – is a condition for the overall democratization of

Mexico.

To review, the main elements of Zapatismo as a distinct politics are: a commitment to a

broad popular struggle for national liberation, a recognition of the legitimacy of multiple forms

of struggle in addition to a reliance on arms, an identification of civil society as the real agent of

democratic change, an emphasis on the democratic responsibilities of leadership in the form of

mandar obedeciendo, a commitment to the construction of autonomous institutions of popular

self-governance in the form of autonomous municipalities, and an understanding that the

recognition of indigenous rights within a multi-ethnic society is a condition of democracy. In


different measures these elements would capture the imagination of sympathetic forces in

Mexico and around the world, giving Zapatismo a significance that reached well beyond the

indigenous communities of Chiapas.

Zapatismo and the Rise of the Alter-Globalization Movement

The first two years following the Zapatista uprising was a period of intense political

innovation and experimentation on the part of the Zapatistas during which they sought to respond

to unexpected and rapidly unfolding events and developments. One very significant such

development was the emergence of what Rovira (2009) has called “the transnational Zapatista

solidarity network.” As Cleaver (1998) argues, the Zapatista uprising brought together, initially

mainly by means of the internet, previously disconnected networks of activists, scholars and

NGO workers concerned with a wide range of issues. Rovira documents in detail the process by

which this network was initially constituted, how it developed over time, the tactical repertoire

that came to characterize it, and how, by initiating the wave of protests targeting international

summit meetings, it metamorphosized into the alter-globalization movement.

While the internet played a central role in initially constituting the transnational Zapatista

solidarity network, it would be a mistake to think of it as existing exclusively on the internet.

Rather the availability of information on the internet seemed to encourage activists to travel to

Chiapas and then, as their reports on their travels circulated on the internet, amplified their

impact. All of these comings and going from Chiapas established a very dense network of face to

face relationships both with the Zapatistas but also between their supporters. The tens of

thousands of people from outside Chiapas who travelled there and had some direct personal

experience of the Zapatista uprising thus constituted a large committed core of a much larger


network of their friends, family members, co-workers, church members, fellow students, and

other activists whom they would share information with and mobilize as events demanded. It

was in the hopes of consolidating this network further that the Zapatistas called for the first

Intercontinental Encuentro Against Neo-Liberalism and For Humanity (or the Intergalactica as it

would be dubbed by Marcos) to be held in Zapatista territory in the summer of 1996. This

gathering brought together thousands of Zapatista solidarity activists from dozens of countries

for the first time. While participants listened to speeches by Marcos and other Zapatistas and

participated in formal meetings, the real significance of the Encuentro was the face to face

consolidation of heretofore largely electronic lines of communications between Zapatista

sympathizers, laying the foundations for what would soon emerge as the alter-globalization

movement.

This is most clearly illustrated by the role of the Encuentro in the formation of Peoples

Global Action. (Wood 2005) The success of the First Intercontinental Encuentro in Chiapas

resulted in a call for a Second Intercontinental Encuentro Against Neo-Liberalism and For

Humanity in Spain in 1997. Out of that meeting a call was made for another meeting in Geneva

in February, 1998 to organize Peoples Global Action (PGA) to coordinate resistance to neo-

liberal globalization generally, and to the upcoming May ministerial meeting of the World Trade

Organization (WTO) in Geneva in particular. The protests in Geneva marked the beginning of

the cycle of transnational protests at major international summit meetings that became the most

visible expression of the alter-globalization movement. The influence of Zapatismo on the

political outlook and organizational practice of the alter-globalization movement is evident in the

“Five Hallmarks” that would be the PGA’s basis of political unity. The Five Hallmarks are:

A very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism and feudalism; all trade agreements, institutions and governments that promote destructive globalization.


We reject all forms and systems of domination and discrimination including, but not limited to, patriarchy, racism and religious fundamentalism of all creeds. We embrace the full dignity of all human beings.

A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations, in which transnational capital is the only real policy-maker.

A call to direct action and civil disobedience, support for social movements’ struggles, advocating forms of resistance which maximize respect for life and oppressed peoples’ rights, as well as the construction of local alternatives to global capitalism.

An organizational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy. (L. J. Wood 2005)

Although the alter-globalization movement would be socially and ideologically very

heterogeneous, the Five Hallmarks reflected a core set of political assumptions and practices that

predominate within it and that came to define it. These included: a profound distrust of the state

in all its forms and of political parties that seek state power and a determination to engage in

political action at a distance from the state; a belief in the superiority of decentralized, networked

or horizontal forms of political organization and a general hostility to hierarchical forms of

organization; a reliance on consensus-based methods of decision-making; and an affirmation of

social and cultural diversity as a virtue in its own right.

While these political assumptions and practices draw on a variety of lineages including

anarchism, feminism, and the participatory democratic ethos of the New Left of the 1960s, it is

clear that the Zapatista uprising played a critical role in catalyzing the emergence of the alter-

globalization movement and that Zapatismo has had a major and direct influence on the

configuration of its political outlook and practices.

While the alter-globalization movement in general experienced a sharp decline following

the events of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing global U.S. “war on terror,” the more recent


upsurges of the Arab Spring, the movements of the plazas in southern Europe, and Occupy Wall

Street in the United States (to name only some) are widely acknowledged as inheritors of its

radical anti-capitalist and participatory democratic ethos. The initiators of the movements of the

plazas and Occupy Wall Street both included prominent veterans of the alter-globalization

upsurge of the previous decade. While the words and imagery of the Zapatista uprising are, not

surprisingly considerably less prominent in these recent upsurges, the Zapatistas continue to

command considerable respect within their ranks. More importantly their ideas continue to

exercise considerable influence even if their success in becoming the common sense of the

movement means that many are not aware of their genesis.

EZLN Activities Since 1996

If 1996 marked the beginnings of the alter-globalization movement, it also marked the

beginning of a very difficult period for the EZLN. No further talks followed the signing of the

San Andres Accords. Instead, the late 1990s saw the government pursue a counter-insurgency

strategy of “low-intensity conflict” against the EZLN and their civilian support bases that would

culminate in the massacre by government trained and sponsored paramilitaries of 45 men,

women and children in the village of Acteal on December 22, 1997.

The defeat of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in the presidential

elections of 2000 produced a number of changes in the situation facing the Zapatistas. The new

President, Vicente Fox, ordered the release of Zapatista prisoners and the closure of a number of

the military bases that had been built outside Zapatista communities, and the Zapatistas

organized a march (known widely as La Marcha) on Mexico City to press the Congress to

implement the San Andres Accords. While La Marcha attracted enormous crowds as it moved


through Southern Mexico, and while members of the Zapatista comandancia were allowed to

address the Congress, the legislation that was finally passed effectively gutted the San Andres

Accords.

In the aftermath of La Marcha and the betrayal of the San Andres Accords, the Zapatistas

refocused on building up the structures of civilian self-government that they had initiated with

the formation of the autonomous municipalities and in 2004 announced the formation of five

regional Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Good Government Committees), charged with coordinating

the work of the 30 functioning autonomous municipalities.

While the period from 1996 to 2004 saw the Zapatistas engaged in often intense

struggles, their general political orientation remained more or less consistent. The conceptual

repertoire articulated between the 1994 uprising and the signing of the San Andres Accords was

further elaborated here and there, but its central themes changed little. Zapatista activity during

this period was focused on three main concerns: the implementation of the San Andres Accords;

confronting the police, military and paramilitary violence directed at the Zapatista communities;

and building up their own autonomous structures of self-government.

This orientation shifted in June 2005, when the EZLN issued the Sixth Declaration of the

Lacandon Jungle (Subcomandante Marcos and EZLN 2006) more commonly known as la Sexta.

La Sexta represented a break with the almost single-minded focus on the question of indigenous

rights and autonomy that had dominated the Zapatista’s discourse since the signing of the San

Andres Accords. It envisioned an alliance of the indigenous peoples with all the other oppressed,

exploited and excluded sectors of Mexican society and proposed a series of meetings in Zapatista

territory with representatives of the different sectors. These gatherings, conducted over several

weekends in the fall of 2005, produced the call for the la Otra Campaña (the Other Campaign or


simply La Otra ), conceived of as an alternative to the electoral campaigns of the political parties

scheduled for 2006. The first phase of La Otra consisted primarily of a sort of reconnaissance

tour of the country by Marcos, now renamed Delegate Zero on a motorcycle, accompanied by a

“penguin” (actually a chicken) and various allies.

La Sexta discursively, and La Otra in practice, marked a shift in the EZLN’s political

orientation. Pérez Ruíz (Pérez Ruíz 2005) has argued that la Sexta was a return to the EZLN’s

pre-1994 “radical project.” While that characterization oversimplifies the process of political

development involved, it is certainly the case that la Sexta marked a break with the Zapatistas

focus on the questions of indigenous rights and autonomy and a re-articulation of a vision of a

broad extra-electoral and anti-capitalist Mexican left reminiscent of the themes of the First

Declaration. In practice La Otra sought, and continues to pursue with mixed results, the linking

together of heterogeneous nodes of resistance in order to reconstitute that left.

In short, with the founding of the EZLN in 1983 and its subsequent embrace by a large

fraction of the indigenous-campesino movement, Zapatismo emerged as a distinct political

current within that movement in Chiapas. When the 1994 Zapatista uprising and the rapid

initiation of talks with the government compelled the Zapatistas to experiment politically, they

were able to draw on the unusual conceptual wealth of both the indigenous-campesino

movement, and its indigenous and non-indigenous antecedents, to articulate a very creative

response to the new political terrain carved out by neo-liberal globalization, a response that in

turn captured the imaginations of the generation of young radical activists who would initiate the

alter-globalization movement. The influence of Zapatismo, or rather a particular reading (or as I

will argue on certain points, a misreading) of Zapatismo, on the alter-globalization movement

and consequently on other movements with roots in the alter-globalization movement suggests


the value of a serious historical sociological investigation into the origins and development of the

Zapatistas distinctive politics. In the next section I will look at the contributions of other theorists

and researchers to a comprehensive understanding of the genesis of Zapatismo in order to lay a

foundation for the rest of this study.

Communism

The Zapatista uprising did not just happen. It was made. While it is undoubtedly possible

using the methods and models developed within the sociology of contentious politics to identify

the main antecedent conditions that predisposed the indigenous communities to rebel, those

methods and models will not give us a satisfactory explanation of how come the politics of the

rebellion took the distinctive form that they did. In order to develop such an explanation we need

to understand how the cultural and ideological formation of new revolutionary subjects responds,

not just to local social conditions, but to the global development of the larger revolutionary

process of which they are a part.

While I will describe in the next chapter the social conditions that I believe favored the

organization of an indigenous revolt in Chiapas it is not my intention here to argue for any of the

particular available models of the causes agrarian revolt nor to advance one of my own. I am

seeking only to establish the general context in which the revolt emerged so as to inform the

discussion of why it took the form that it did, which is to say why the people who made it did so

the way that they did.

Zapatismo is not simply a conveniently cobbled together justification of the self-

interested actions of the indigenous campesinos who make up the ranks of the EZLN. Nor is it,

as Wickham-Crowley would suggest, an expression of the psychological frustrations of


university-educated left-wing youth, adopted wholesale by the EZLN’s campesino base for their

own instrumental reasons.

Zapatismo then, I will argue, is a local product of a global process. It is a recent chapter

in the much longer story of the oppressed majority of humanity’s striving to realize the

communist idea made real by the emergence of the capitalist world system. While it had recourse

to the proto-communist thought of the indigenous communities which has roots going back at

least to the immediate aftermath of the conquest, its global resonance derives primarily from its

creative response to the deep crisis in revolutionary theory that revealed itself most clearly in the

course of the revolutionary upheavals of the 1960s. As such the story of its genesis has the

potential to illuminate a number of problems posed by that crisis.

Zapatismo is a synthesis of several distinct currents of communist thought. That synthesis

did not occur in a single moment, but rather over the course of roughly thirty years. While it is of

course impossible to trace every shift in the thinking of every participant in this process it is

possible to identify a series of nodal moments.

The first of these moments is the development of what I am calling a proto-communist

consciousness within the indigenous communities in the wake of the conquest and their radical

reorganization by Dominican missionaries animated by a Lascasian Christianity that challenged

the central organizing principle of the Spanish colonial empire, namely the racial subordination

of the indigenous people to their new colonial masters. This current of thought coexisted with

others and expressed itself openly only episodically in the form of major indigenous revolts, but

was nonetheless nurtured and passed from generation to generation into the 20th century.


The second moment was the crisis in the whole traditional worldview of the communities

in the post-Second World War period, when radical transformations in the political economy of

Chiapas exposed the inadequacy of that worldview and made them receptive to a wide range of

competing modern ideological projects including evangelical Protestantism, liberation theology,

Maoism, and finally the left-wing revolutionary nationalism of the FLN.

The third moment, and arguably the most critical one, was the elaboration of a layer of

organic indigenous campesino intellectuals in the course of the training of indigenous catechists

by the Diocese of San Cristóbal. It was the appearance of this group that gave the communities to

which the catechists belonged the potential for intellectual independence that was a condition for

their constitution as a self-conscious collective political subject. This process was not

foreordained and in fact developed very unevenly from community to community, but where it

brought the proto-communist thought present in the communities into protracted conversation

with the most radical currents within the liberationist church it nurtured into existence the

nucleus of a new and highly creative political force.

The fourth moment in this process was the constitution of the indigenous campesino

movement through which this nucleus constituted itself as the leading element of a much larger

social group. This moment was facilitated by the arrival of several waves of Maoist asesores

who deepened the communities critical analysis of capitalism and their own place within it and

greatly developed their organizational capacities.

The fifth moment was the constitution of a fraction of the indigenous campesino

movement as a revolutionary people which no longer simply saw itself pursuing its own

particular interest but which rather identified itself deeply with a larger project of human

emancipation. This coincided with a crisis in the indigenous campesino movement precipitated


by the exhaustion of the Maoist project, the leadership of which was collaborating more and

more with elements in the ruling party at the very moment that the indigenous campesino

movement was facing intensified state repression.

The sixth moment is effective fusion of the political-military organizational project of the

FLN with a deeply radicalized fraction of the indigenous campesino movement leading to the

founding of the EZLN in 1983 and its subsequent expansion to incorporate much of the larger

movement. The revolutionary people had found their organizational expression in the form of a

revolutionary army.

The seventh moment, and from the perspective of this study the final one that concerns

us, involves the overthrow of the ladino leadership of the FLN and the decision on the part of the

communities to launch the uprising.

The identification of these nodal moments helps us see the simultaneous and interwoven

processes through which a new revolutionary subject was constituted, both theoretically and

practically, over the course of several decades. Insofar as they reflect particular struggles with

problems that confront anti-systemic movements more generally I am suggesting that a closer

look at each should enrich our understanding of the sources of Zapatismo’s global resonance and

give us a much fuller appreciation of the lessons that Zapatismo has to offer such movements

than a simple reading of the Zapatistas post-1994 political discourse and practices ever will.

Below I discuss in somewhat greater detail the theoretical perspectives that will inform the

consideration of several of these nodal moments.

The overthrow of the FLN’s mestizo leadership and its replacement by the CCRI-GC in

January 1993 has been interpreted by many sympathetic to the EZLN as a rupture with the

FLN’s communist politics. What I am arguing here is that it is much better understood as an


overcoming of those aspects of the FLNs politics, not least of which were its deep reluctance to

go on the offensive and initiate armed struggle against the Mexican state, that were obstructing

the EZLN’s potential to actually advance the communist politics that animated the whole project.

The contribution of the “indigenous element” to Zapatismo then should not be understood as a

repudiation of communism so much as a rejection of its reification in a form that had become

exhausted. Thus, when the EZLN broke with the urban leadership of the FLN and decided to go

to war, it represented an advanced expression of communism, but at a moment when the political

name of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” was not, or could not

be, “communism,” or even “socialism.” This, however, only becomes apparent when we are able

to locate the Zapatistas and Zapatismo within a much larger and longer-term process of its

historical development.

An important aspect of this, of course, is the impact and resonance that Zapatismo has

had on anti-systemic social movements globally since 1994. As I argued in Chapter 1, the

international Zapatista solidarity network that arose in the wake of the 1994 uprising played a

critical role in catalyzing the emergence of the alter-globalization movement in the late 1990s,

deeply informing that movement’s strategic outlook and organizational practices. More recently,

of course, many of the movements that erupted around the world in 2011 have adopted much of

the alter-globalization movement’s anti-capitalist analysis of neo-liberalism as well as its

repertoire of consensus decision-making, distrust of centralized leadership, and mass

mobilization at a deliberate distance from the state. Zapatismo, of course, is only one of many

influences on recent movements, but as I am suggesting here, it played a unique catalytic role in

bringing together previously dispersed and disconnected forces, first in the form of the

international Zapatista solidarity network, and then in the form of the alter-globalization


movement which, in effect, codified and popularized what it understood to be the essence of

Zapatismo which has now reappeared in the even larger recent wave of anti-systemic

movements.

As I have argued above, Zapatismo was the product of a creative synthesis of several partial

expressions of communism that emerged in the context of a crisis in the communist movement

around the relationship between revolutionary leadership and mass democracy. It is on this

question that Zapatismo most clearly distinguishes itself from the dominant thinking in the

communist movement during the short 20th century between the Russian Revolution and the fall

of the Berlin Wall. The reconception of the historic relationship between leadership and

democracy is at the heart of what is distinct in the Zapatista synthesis.

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