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Author : Aufheben
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[1] Here we use the term as a convenient if problematic label for a political area,an area with which we have an affinity.As we sais in Aufheben 6 Fnt.2 .36 those who leftists dismiss as ‘ultra-left’ would argue that it is simply they are communist and their opponents are not.However as communism is not a particular interpretation of the world held by some people,but a real social movement, we will not go down the path of attaching the approval-label ‘communist’ or ‘revolutionary’ to the small set of individuals and groups with whom one considers oneself in close enough theoretical agreement.
[2] For an interesting discussion of the difference between autonomist and (left-)communist or situationist approaches,see the Introductions to Technoskeptic and the Bordiga Archive at Antagonism
[3] Opponents of ‘neo-liberalism’ or ‘globalization’ all too often identify capitalism with rampant multinationals and US dominated trade organizations.Tending to complain about the subordination of the national economy and the undermining of democratic institutions they end up appealing to the state to tame the economy-failing to recognize those same democratic states consciously participated in the creation of the structures of the global economy.Opposing ‘neo-liberalism’ can easily lead back to supporting social democracy. Neoliberal ideology itself,as aggressively expounded by the bourgeois of Britain,America and latterly Mexico is an expression of the increased global mobility of finance capital,which was utilized to outflank the class struggles of the 1970’s and has been used since in capital’s attempts to avoid areas of working class strength.
[4] The best source of day-to-day news of the ongoing situation is the Chiapas website,at www.eco.utexas.edu. The Irish Mexico support group,which has a continuous presence in the Zapatista village of Diez de abril,also has an excellent website.We would encourage any readers who have the time and the money to visit Chiapas themselves.Chiapaslink have made several trips and can give good advice;they can be contacted at PO Box 79,82 Colston street,Bristol BS1 5BB,UK.
[5] The many reformist elements of the CND were unable to make even a policy decision to vote for the main left opposition group,the PRD (Partido Revolucionario Democratico),although many groups and individuals who attended inevitably did so.
[6] Much of this section has been taken from The Mexican Revolution (London,1983) by the orthodox Marxist Adolpho Gilly.Gilly’s line is of course that the working class would have chosen the right side of the revolution if they had been mature enough to develop a Leninist Party in 1915.But the book’s strength,apart from its empirical data,is the emphasis on the uncompromising nature of the peasant war.It is influential,having been reprinted twenty-seven times in Latin America since 1971.
[7] For our analysis of the peasantry as a class we have primarily used The awkward Class by T.Shanin,Oxford University Press,1972,and Community and Communism in Russia by Jaques Camatte.
[8] Until 1964 the bracero program allowed Mexicans to enter the US for seasonal agriculture work.Once there they were invariably treated as slaves and unwittingly kept the American worker’s wages down.The border has long served as a safety valve for the discontent of Mexico’s proles and peasants,a valve that both US and Mexican bourgeoisies are more than happy to keep open,whatever their rhetoric.
[9] The best account of this we can find in English is in chapter 20 of Mexico,Biography of Power by Enrique Krauze (HarperCollins 1998).
[10] For an account of the debateof the 1980s on whether to stay inside the CTM or form a new organization,from the perspective of day-to-day struggle,see ‘Las Costurersa’ (women textile workers) in Midnight Notes No.9,May 1998.
[11] A good example is neighborhood of Tepito ,as described in ‘The uses of an Earthquake’ by Harry Cleaver,again in Midnight Notes No.9.
[12] A good example of the way in which privitisation policies have undermined the PRI’s social base is on the railways.Since the selling off of the rail network and subsequent redundancies and pay cuts,the PRI-controlled railworkers’s union has lost more than 70% of its members.As a result the Charros have found their funds slashed and their influence eroded.
[13] The ‘Jungle’ novels of B. Traven ,particularly The Rebellion of the Hanged (Allison and Busby) are excellent for an historical understanding of Chiapas in this period.
[14] Rebellion from the Roots by John Ross,Common Courage Press,1995,p.70.This book of left journalism is the best narrative account of the opening months of the Zapatista struggle in 1994 and provides a useful background to Mexican politics, especially the corruption of the PRI.
[15] Accustomed to production for consumption on small plots, these families suddenly found themselves the legal owners of immense tracts of land.he government fully expected them to transform themselves into professional farmers and bastions of private property.The families however,hitherto members of the ‘different world’ of the peasntry were completely unable to make this qualitative jump.Instead they sold concessions to logging companies and self-destructed on a diet of TV and alcohol .
[16] One action that appears completely unmediated took place in San Andres Larrainzar in 1973,where 22 years later,peace talks between The EZLN and the PRI would be held:Tzotil Indians attacked the homes of landowners, threatening to machete them to death unless they abandoned their farms and ranches-which they did in double quick time.
[17] See for example ‘Chiapas and the Global Restructuring of capital’ by Ana Esther Cecana and Andreas Barreda in Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico,eds. John Holloway and Eloina Perez,Pluto Press,1999.
[18] Farmers and ranchers are being driven into making the environment relatively barren,in terms of creating a monoculture,oil companies to make the environment absolutely barren in their destructive quest for petroleum.
[19] Although not intimately tied-in with the neo-liberal project,1989 also saw the state logging company of COLFALSA impose a total logging ban in Chiapas,so depriving the Indians of a vital source of fuel.Naturally tree-cutting continued illegally,but the creation of a new armed police force to enforce the ban meant another layer of repression for the indigenous people.
[20] We have taken the details in this section from Rebellion in Chiapas:An Historical Reader by John Womack jnr (The New Press,New York,1999).Womack is the author of Zapata and the Mexican Revolution which was published in 1969 and which,together with Gilly,is the standard work on that period.He has been very well-informed about the Mexican left for years and the detail he gives in Rebellion in Chiapas is incredible.In particular has has destroyed the image Marcos has tried so hard to portray of indigenous Indians forcing urban leftists to abandon their ideology in the years before the uprising took place.His book should come to be seen as a standard work on the EZLN,and is a must read for all Zapatista supporters.
[21] A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Guterriez,1971,is the key text.
[22] Communism and Community in Russia by Jacques Camatte.Of course,out of context this quote from Camatte sounds too abstract.Every religon must in fact reflect the material and social relations and thus the prevailing mode of production (religon is not ‘God’ but what you have to do for God).As such,religions normally discourage opposition to these prevailing social relations.Of course any religious text or tradition born in a past mode of production is at odds with capitalism.In order to remain a religious authority within bourgeoisie society and,in the same time,retain the Bible and its whole tradition,the Catholic Church emptied them of their original content.Of course a ‘free’ reading or interpretation of its tradition can highlight elements that can be used to justify rebellion-and this reading can have authority above all if this is backed by some priests.But the contradiction inherent in this use religon appears when the supporters of the Theology of Liberation collide with the high authorities within the Church (the main theorist of the Theology of Liberation, L.Boff, was deprived of his official powers-‘suspended a divinis’).
[23] Womack, op cit.,p.43
[24] The Ez as a standing army is relatively small-combatientes are sent back home once their training and exercises are over,ready to be mobilized should the need arise.The full fighting strength of the EZ is probably around 17,000
[25] Deneuve & Reeve, Behind the Balaclavas of South-East Mexico, discussed in more detail below.
[26] Because it takes the most provocative relentlessly unsympathetic stance,we wil deal largely here with Behind the Balaclavas of South-East Mexico by Sylvie Deneuve and Charles Reeve,Ab Irato,Paris 1996 (available from BM Chronos,London WC1N 3XX,£1.50).Two other texts we have in mind are ‘Mexico is not Chiapas,Nor is the Revolt in Chiapas Only a Mexican Affair’ by Katerina (TPTG) in (Common Sense No.22,Winter 1997);and ‘Unmasking the Zapatistas’ in Wildcat No.18,Summer 1996.Though we use the term ‘ultra-left’ the writers differ; TPTG are more situationist-influenced,Deneuve and Reeve more council-communists,while Wildcat (UK — or should it be US — not Wildcat Germany) like to emphasize their’hard’ anti-democratic credentials.On the Zapatistas ,Katerina’s is by far the most poitive of these three.However,TPTG’s position towards the Zapatistas seems to have hardened, judging by their recent review of the book version of the Deneuve and Reeve piece.
[27] Antagonism, op. cit.
[28] Indeed, when the EZLN entered into peace talks in Febuary 1994 they demanded not the restitution of Article 27,but the nationwide implementation of the Ayala Plan,much to the derision of the PRI
[29] Marx cited in Camatte op. cit.
[30] The best account is the ‘Report from the Second Encounter for Humanity and against Neo-liberalism’ by Massimo de Angelis in Capital and Class No.65,though don’t bother with the dreadful academic waffle in the introduction.
[31] Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution In Mexico, edited by John Holloway and Eloina Perez (Pluto Press, 1998) is the most thoroughgoing attempt to develop ideas about he Chiapas uprising in English and whose arguments we deal chiefly with here.See also Towards the New Commons:Working class strategies and the Zapatistas by Monty Neill, with George Caffentzis and Johhny Machete ( and various articles in recent editions of Capital and Class.In Mexico, the Spanish language journal Chiapas is an ongoing academic project dedicated to exploring various aspects of the rebellion.
[32] ‘Zapatismo: Recomposition of Labor,Radical Democracy and Revolutionary Project’ by Luis Lorenzano in Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution (op. cit.)
[33] Open letter to John Holloway .We would add that it seems that we are not dealing with a merely theoretical issue here,but one related to the position of academic Marxist.They are tempted to use ‘operaismo’ (Italian autonomists) ideas of the ‘social factory’ ,in which all areas of life become work for capital,to suppress the contradictions of their middle class role and redefine themselves as working class.But there is a problem here.There is a contradiction in their desire validate themselves as intellectual workers while on the other hand wishing to claim status for the product of this work as a non-alienated contribution to the movement of labor against capital.Indeed, perhaps the attraction of Marcos to many of the academic autonomist Marxists is that he,a fellow left intellectual,seems to be actually doing for the peasants of South-East Mexico, what they,the academics, claim to be able to do for the whole of the world working class, i.e. articulate and communicate the meaning of their struggle.The social division between mental and manual labor is the basis of class society; it must be overcome.The university is the supreme expression of this division; it is the artificial intelligence of the social factory.We are not saying that nothing useful comes from the academic Marxists,but simply that their social position affects what they write.
[34] The combination of a pluralist program which defends diversity,traditional and quasi-mystical Mayan Indians and the image of the masked-up guerrillas is the reason the UK direct action scene has found the Zapatista struggle so irresistible.
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February 01, 2021 : Notes -- Added.
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