"What Have the Zapatistas Accomplished?" (I. Wallerstein)

EN ESPAÑOL

Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University

http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/commentr.htm

Commentary No. 224, Jan. 1, 2008

"What Have the Zapatistas Accomplished?"

On January 1, 1994, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional
(EZLN), commonly called the Zapatistas, led an insurrection in San
Cristobal de las Casas in the state of Chiapas in Mexico. Just under
fourteen years later, the EZLN convened an international colloquium on
December 13-17, 2007 in the same city on the theme "Planet Earth:
Antisystemic Movements" - a sort of stock-taking, both global and
local, of their objectives. I myself participated in this colloquium,
as did many other activists and intellectuals. In the course of the
colloquium, Subcommandant Marcos gave a series of six talks, which are
available on the internet.

In a sense, what everyone was asking, including Marcos, is what have
the Zapatistas accomplished and what are the future prospects of
antisystemic movements - in Chiapas and in the world? The answer to
this question is not simple. Let us start the story on January 1,
1994. That day was chosen for the beginning of the insurrection
because it was the day on which the North American Free Trade
Association (NAFTA) came into effect. The slogan that day was ¡Ya
basta! ("Enough is enough"). The Zapatistas were saying from the
outset that their five-century- long protest against injustice and
humiliation and demand for autonomy was linked today organically to
the worldwide struggle against neo-liberalism and imperialism of which
NAFTA was both a part and a symbol.

Chiapas, let us remember, is perhaps the poorest region of Mexico and
its population is composed overwhelmingly of so-called indigenous
peoples. The first Catholic bishop of Chiapas was Bartolomé de Las
Casas, the sixteenth-century Dominican priest who devoted his life to
defending vigorously (before the Church and the Spanish monarchy) the
rights of the Indians to equal treatment. From the days of Las Casas
until 1994, the Indians never saw that right acknowledged. The EZLN
decided to try different methods. So were they more successful? We
should look at the impact of the movement in three arenas: in Mexico
as a political arena; in the world-system as a whole; in the realm of
theorizing about antisystemic movements.

First, Mexico: Armed insurrection as a tactic was suspended after
about three months. It has never been resumed. And it is clear that it
will not be unless the Mexican army or right-wing paramilitaries
massively attack autonomous Zapatista communities. On the other hand,
the truce agreement reached with the Mexican government - the
so-called San Andrés accords providing for the recognition of autonomy
for the indigenous communities - was never implemented by the
government.

In 2001, the Zapatistas led a peaceful march across Mexico to the
capital, hoping thereby to force the Mexican Congress to legislate the
essential of the accords. The march was spectacular but the Mexican
Congress failed to act. In 2005, the Zapatistas launched "the other
campaign," an effort to mobilize an alliance of Zapatistas with groups
in other provinces with more or less similar objectives - again
spectacular but it did not change the actual politics of the Mexican
government.

In 2006, the Zapatistas pointedly refused to endorse the
left-of-center candidate for the presidency, Andrés Manuel López
Obrador, who was running in a tight election against the proclaimed
winner, the very conservative Felipe Calderón. This action was the one
that caused most controversy with Zapatista sympathizers in Mexico and
the rest of the world, many of whom felt that it cost López Obrador
the election. The Zapatista position derived from their deep sense
that electoral politics does not pay. The Zapatistas have been
critical of all the left-of-center presidents in Latin America, from
Lula in Brazil to Chávez in Venezuela, on the grounds that they were
all top-down movements which changed nothing fundamental at the base
for the oppressed majority. The only Latin American government which
the Zapatistas speak well of is that of Cuba, because it is the only
government they consider to be truly anti-capitalist.

On the other hand, within Mexico, the Zapatistas have managed to
establish de facto autonomous indigenous communities which operate
well, albeit they are besieged and constantly menaced by the Mexican
army. The political sophistication and determination of these
communities is impressive. Will this however last in the absence of
serious political change in Mexico, especially in the light of
increasing pressure on the rights of the Indians to control their own
land? This is the unresolved issue.

The picture on the world scene is somewhat different. There is no
question that the Zapatista insurrection of 1994 became a major
inspiration for antisystemic movements throughout the world. It is
unquestionably a key turning-point in the process that led to the
demonstrations in 1999 at Seattle that caused the failure of the
meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a failure from which
the WTO has never recovered. If today the WTO finds itself
semi-moribund as a result of a North-South deadlock, the Zapatistas
can claim some credit.

Seattle in turn led to the creation in 2001 of the World Social Forum
(WSF), which has become the principal meeting-ground of the world's
antisystemic movements. And if the Zapatistas themselves have never
attended any WSF meeting because technically they are an armed force,
the Zapatistas have remained an iconic movement within the WSF, a sort
of inspirational force.

The Zapatistas from the beginning have said that their objectives and
concerns were worldwide - intergalactic in their jargon - and they
offered support to movements everywhere and asked actively for support
from movements everywhere. They have been very successful in this. And
if some worldwide support has suffered fatigue of late, the December
2007 colloquium was clearly an attempt to resuscitate these alliances.

In many ways, however, the most important contribution of the
Zapatistas - and the most contested - has been in the theoretical
realm. It was striking that in the six talks that Marcos gave in
December, the first devoted itself to the importance of theorizing in
the social sciences. What do the Zapatistas say about how to analyze
the world?

First of all, they emphasize that the basic thing that is wrong with
the world today is that it is a capitalist world, and that the basic
thing to change is that, something they insist will require a real
struggle. Now the Zapatistas are surely not the first ones to argue
this. So what do they add to this? They are part of a post-1968 view
that the traditional analyses of the Old Left were too narrow, in that
they seemed to emphasize only the problems and struggles of the urban
industrial proletariat. Marcos devoted one whole talk to the struggles
of women for their rights. He devoted another to the crucial
importance of control of the land by the world's rural workers.

And quite strikingly he placed several talks under the rubric,
"neither core nor periphery" - rejecting the idea of a priority for
one or the other, either in terms of power or of intellectual
analysis. The Zapatistas are proclaiming that the struggle for rights
of every oppressed group is equally important, and the struggle must
be fought on all fronts at the same time.

They also say that the movements themselves must be internally
democratic. The slogan is "mandar obedeciendo," which might be
translated "lead by obeying the voice and wishes of those whom one is
leading." This is easy to say and hard to do, but it is a cry against
the historic verticalism of left movements. This leads them to a
"horizontalism" in the relations between different movements. Some of
their followers say that they are opposed to taking state power ever.
While they are deeply skeptical of taking state power via the "lesser
evil," they are willing to make exceptions, as in the case of Cuba.

Was the Zapatista insurrection a success? The only answer is in the
apocryphal story about the answer that Zhou En-lai is supposed to have
given to the question: "What do you think of the French Revolution?"
Answer: "It is too early to tell."

by Immanuel Wallerstein

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