Since the occupation of January 1994, many have projected their hopes onto this ‘exotic’ struggle against ‘neo-liberalism’. We examine the nature of the Zapatista uprising by moving beyond the bluster of the EZLN communiqués, on which so many base their analysis.

Not proletarian, yet not entirely peasant, the Zapatistas’ political ideas are riven with contradictions. We reject the academics’ argument of Zapatismo’s centrality as the new revolutionary subject, just as we reject the assertions of the ‘ultra-left’ that because the Zapatistas do not have a communist program they are simply complicit with capital. We see the Zapatistas as a moment in the struggle to replace the reified community of capital with the real human community. Their battle for land against the rancheros and latifundistas reminds us of capital’s (permanent) transitions rather than its apparent permanence.

We have not previously felt moved to comment on the Zapatista uprising, not because we have had no interest, but because we distrusted the way in which so many were quick to project their hopes onto this ‘exotic’ struggle. Everyone from anarchists to Marxist-Leninists, indigenous people’s freaks to social democrats, primitivists to ‘Third World’ developmentalists — all seemed able to see what they wanted in the struggle in Chiapas.

Subcommandante Marcos, the shrewd EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista de Nacional Liberacion) spokesman, maximized the attractiveness and impact of the Zapatistas on progressive opinion by maintaining a conscious ambiguity around their politics. For us, however, his demagogic appeals to ‘liberty! justice! democracy!’ were something with which we had little affinity. It was apparent that making sense of the uprising would require an understanding of what the Indians were doing on the ground, distinct both from the way their spokespeople chose to portray the struggle, and from the way in which this representation was taken up to fulfill the needs of political actors in very different situations.

Two currents have attempted to go beyond the cheerleading for the Zapatistas to provide a more theoretical grasp of this movement. ‘Autonomist Marxism’, now largely based in academia, has embraced the Chiapas revolt, seeing it as central to a new recomposition of the world working class. On the other hand a much more critical response can be found in a number of ‘ultra left’[1] inspired articles. As both tendencies favor autonomous class struggle and oppose traditional leftist ideas, why such different conclusions on the rebellion?

On one level we can see it as a matter of a different theoretical approach. While the autonomists focus on the movement of struggle, thinking in terms of a generalization of Zapatismo, the ‘ultra left’ look more to the content of Zapatista politics — their program — the limits of which they identify in the democratic and nationalist framework into which the Indians’ struggle has been projected.[2] At the same time, while the autonomists wish to move with the mood of solidarity and inspiration the uprising has created, the ‘ultra left’ are disturbed by the way that identification with the EZLN is functioning, which has similarities to the role of anti-imperialist and Third Worldist ideology in the past. Support for existing struggle can become an ideological identification which represses criticism. However, criticism of struggle does not have to lead to an ideological turn against it.

Our interest in the struggle in Mexico is how it expresses the universal movement towards the supersession of the capitalist mode of production. One needs to avoid acting as judge of every manifestation of this universal movement, dismissing those manifestations which don’t measure up, while at the same time avoiding uncritical prostration before such expressions. The real movement must always be open, self-critical, prepared to identify limits to its present practice, and to overcome them. Here it is understood that communism ‘is not an ideal to which reality must accommodate itself.’ Our task is to understand, and to be consciously part of something which already truly exists — the real movement that seeks to abolish the existing conditions.

Introduction: The Mexican context

In past issues of Aufheben we have examined the retreat by the international bourgeoisie from the use of social democracy as a form of mediating class struggle, and asked whether it may reappear from future class struggle. So far we have focused our attention on Europe and North America. The retreat from social democracy is not confined to these areas, however. Class struggle in Mexico has been distorted for decades by a particularly durable strain of social democracy, personified by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI).

Social democracy is everywhere in retreat in Mexico. But the recent nine-month strike by students of the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) over tuition fees and the electricity workers’ successful campaign against privatization of the power grid are both indications of a new climate of resistance to the waves of economic rationalization. Marching together in Mexico City demanding the release of political prisoners, they have formulated the beginnings of an alternative to so-called ‘neoliberalism’[3] — an alternative, it must be said, that as yet appears unable to move beyond the crushing weight of social democracy that is the heritage of the Mexican working class.

If anything in the recent history of class struggle in this gigantic country is able to look practically beyond social democracy, to the possibility of the constitution of human community over the reified community of capital, it is the struggle of the Zapatista Indians of Chiapas.

A brief chronology [4]

The Zapatistas first came to the attention of Mexico, and the world, when they occupied the Chiapan towns of San Cristobal de las Casas, Las Margaritas, Altamirano and Ocosingo on January 1^st 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was due to begin operation. After destroying civil records and reading out their proclamation of revolt from the balcony of the Town Hall, the EZLN laid siege to the nearby military base of Rancho Nuevo, capturing weapons and releasing prisoners from the region’s jails. The Mexican army responded savagely. The Zapatista army was dislodged relatively easily from the towns (although there was quite a fight in Ocosingo) and air force bombers followed the retreating indigenous soldiers back into the highlands, Los Altos. January 10^th saw a half-million strong demonstration for peace in Mexico City.

Within days the President, Carlos Salinas, unnerved by the sympathetic attention the Indians were receiving and the jitters of the stock market, which had lost 6.2% of its value since the uprising had begun, called a halt to the bombings and summary executions. February and March saw peace negotiations take place in San Cristobal, at which time the popular image of the rebel Indian dressed in black, wearing a ski-mask and toting a gun became an archetype. This period also saw the beginning of the Mexican media’s love affair with Subcommandante Marcos, the apparent spokesman of the EZLN.

Despite visible headway, the differences between the ladino (European blood) politicians and the indigenous peasant were irreconcilable. The PRI wished to limit the negotiations, and therefore the uprising itself, to the status of a ‘local difficulty.’ The Indians wanted to intervene politically on a much broader scale. Once the negotiations had ended, the EZLN representatives took the proposals back to the village assemblies of the Zapatista heartlands where, after three months of discussion, they were massively rejected. A return to war, however, was little more than suicide.

To overcome this bind, the Zapatistas decided to call a National Democratic Convention (CND) in their jungle base of the Lacandon. Coming weeks before the Presidential election, which is held every six years in Mexico, the CND would be an opportunity to bring all the anti-PRI elements of ‘civil society’ together to discuss strategy. But if the Convention was a success in terms of the numbers attending, and therefore a timely morale-booster for the besieged Indians, nothing concrete came of it. Defined only by their hatred of the PRI, these disparate groups could agree on nothing: the inspiration they took from the struggle of the Indians did not translate into a common political project.[5] With the routine reelection of the PRI candidate, Ernesto Zedillo, later that month, the EZLN went into crisis and stayed quiet at the national level for a number of months.

Throughout 1994–95 though, the Indians of eastern Chiapas were seizing more and more land (over 1,500 properties representing more than 90,000 hectares were taken in the period up to June 1995), evicting landowners and organizing their new villages into autonomous municipalities. Protected from the violence of the landowner’s private armies, the Guardias Blancas (White Guards) and other assorted goons by the implied threat of EZLN guns, these municipalities, of which there are currently thirty-two, were growing ever larger and threatened to encroach upon the vital oil fields of north-east Chiapas. Meanwhile the army tightened its cordon, building new roads and bases.

December 1994 saw the EZLN break through the blockade and surround the Mexican army, before disappearing into the countryside. In Mexico City, investment flooded out of the stock market after Zedillo was forced to devalue the peso dramatically, an action as traditional for the PRI as their routine polling victories. In February 1995 the army launched a new offensive with much destruction of villages and crops. Demonstrations were immediate in Mexico City. Now the slogan was not ‘Peace in Chiapas’ but ‘We are all Zapatistas’. Once again the army quickly called off their bludgeoning.

Later that year new peace talks began in the Zapatista town of San Andres Larrainzar. The PRI would discuss only indigenous issues, and refused to countenance any Zapatista criticism of Mexico’s new neoliberal economics. Although an Accord on Indigenous Rights and Cultures was signed, which the Zapatistas still view as a great victory, the PRI has since refused to implement it anywhere. This Accord was intended to be the first of five, but it was by now clear that the PRI were using the peace talks to buy time in which to further militarize eastern Chiapas. The EZLN canceled the discussions.

July 1996, with the peace process still ostensibly going forward, saw the ‘First Intercontinental Gathering for Humanity and against Neoliberalism’ (Encuentro). Four thousand delegates from many different countries attended this inaugural conference in the Lacandon jungle. Two have been held since, in Spain and Brazil. Summer ’96 also saw the appearance of a new guerrilla group, the Ejercito Popular Revolucionario (EPR) which attacked the army in its home state of Guerrero. The EZLN refused to develop links with the EPR, accusing them of reproducing a particular type of vanguard model of armed struggle which is sometimes called foquismo in Latin America. The last couple of years has, however, seen a split in the EPR, from which the EPR-I (EPR-Indigenous) has emerged. This group has based itself on the Zapatista model and some links have been developed with the EZLN. However, recently the structure of the EPR-I has been affected by the capture and imprisonment of some of its leaders by the state.

Unable to reach any accommodation with the PRI yet unable to restart their war, the EZLN continue to find themselves at an impasse. The creation of the FZLN (Frente Zapatista de Nacional Liberacion) during 1996 was an attempt to provide a political forum outside Chiapas for ‘civil society’. Set up by the Zapatistas, they themselves have refused to join, claiming that they might dominate proceedings. Subsequently the FZLN has been riven by the ideological ambitions of the Mexico City left, and is commonly considered a failure.

Since then the Zapatistas have fallen back upon nationwide publicity drives. These have the dual role of keeping their struggle and the militarization of eastern Chiapas in the public eye, while simultaneously building solidarity networks as they reach out across Mexico. September 1997 saw 1,111 Zapatistas, one from each autonomous village, march from Chiapas to Mexico City, picking up supporters along the way. March 1999 saw La Consulta: 5000 male and female Zapatistas visited every municipality in Mexico in order to hold a ballot on indigenous rights and the military buildup in Chiapas.

Despite the blockade, the Mexican army is unable to break the power of the autonomous municipalities. This is partly because the measures needed to achieve this would result in eastern Chiapas becoming a charnel house, and the PRI has been unwilling to court that sort of international attention. The army for their part are reluctant. The generals know their troops come largely from Mexico’s urban slums and have no real quarrel with the Zapatistas. A prolonged and vicious attack could quickly bring insubordination and mutiny into the picture. Indeed, according to one officer who has since fled to the US, around a hundred Mexican soldiers deserted in the opening weeks of the Chiapas war. Instead, the army have taken to training paramilitaries, for which they afterwards claim no responsibility. The group Mascara Rojo (Red Mask) carried out the Acteal massacre of December 1997, the single worst atrocity yet in this struggle, in which 45 EZLN sympathizers, including women and children, were gunned down. Naturally the PRI then use such moments to justify sending yet more troops into the area — in order to ‘control the paramilitaries’. Even so, the army has occasionally been let off the leash: April to June 1998 saw attacks on the autonomous municipalities of Flores Magon, Tierra y Libertad and San Juan de Libertad. As a result of these and other incursions, the number of refugees in Chiapas is now over 20,000.

1999 saw better prospects. In September hundreds of UNAM strikers traveled to Chiapas for meetings with the EZ. Desperate to stop the two sides meeting, the army and police pulled out all the stops on the dirt roads leading to the autonomous communities, though a few got through. The UNAM occupation in Mexico City was smashed by an enormous dawn raid in February 2000 and hundreds of students incarcerated on ludicrous terrorism charges. The UNAM strike, the largest student movement since 1968, could have all sorts of effects on Mexico’s class struggle. No doubt some students will be recuperated by the state but further contestation seems inevitable for many. The independent electricity workers union has also sent delegations to eastern Chiapas. In their fight against privatization of the electricity grid they have formed a National Forum which has been joined by over two hundred independent union sections and other social organizations. The electristas appear to have won their battle, though the threat has been lifted partly because privatization remains unpopular and 2000 is an election year. Rationalization in the electricity industry could easily be resurrected by the bourgeoisie in 2001 or 2002. The soil in which these struggles are rooted is still fertile. As the Zapatista supporters in San Cristobal say ‘Nobody in Mexico knows what will happen next.’

The present article is an attempt to analyze the nature of the Zapatista uprising by moving beyond the bluster of the EZLN communiques, on which so many base their analysis of the EZLN. First however, we must examine the roots of the modern state — the Mexican Revolution.