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Celebrationof Zapatismo

byGustavo Esteva

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EDICIONES ¡BASTA!is an autonomous effort ofindividuals and organizationsof the civil society.

A slightly different version of thefirst section of this pamphlet waspublished by Multiversity and CitizensInternational in 2004, to celebrate the10th and 20th anniversary of the Zapatistas.

Translated by Raimundo Esteva.Reviewed by David Kast.

Design and layout: Sergio Beltrán.

Cover Photo: Kathy Orlinsky.

1st edition: November, 2005.2nd edition: March, 2008.

Reproduction by any means isstrictly authorized. We hopethat the source will be mentioned.

EDICIONES ¡BASTA!Azucenas 610, Colonia Reforma, C.P. 68050,Oaxaca de Juárez, Oaxaca, México.Phone and Fax: (951) 5133384.E-mail: unitierra@prodigy.net.mx

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Celebrationof Zapatismo

ZAPATISMO IS nowadays the most radical, and perhaps themost important, political initiative in the world. For ten years,the Zapatistas have been continuously exposed to the attentionof the public and the media. In fact, as surprising as it may seemto those who insist on forgetting them and periodically buryingthem, no contemporary political or social movement has attractedpublic attention as Zapatismo has, in both quantitative and quali-tative terms. None. The Zapatista rebellion, Wallerstein wrote,“has been the most important social movement in the world,the barometer and alarm clock for other anti-system movementsaround the world” (La Jornada, 19-07-05).

�News about the Zapatistas appear regularly in the massmedia, which tries continually to forget them but is obli-gated to return them to the front page each time they startan important initiative.

�The production of texts is incredible. Books containingcommuniqués and other materials generated directly by theZapatistas have been published in many languages and al-ready fill many rows of shelves. Books published about theZapatistas, in dozens of languages, already count in the thou-sands and could fill a mid-sized library. Articles or essays inmagazines and newspapers count hundreds of thousands,perhaps even millions. It has literally become impossible tofollow all the lines of open debate that circle aroundZapatismo.

�Zapatista communiqués are regularly and appropriately pub-lished in a dozen languages and appear the day that they arereleased on various websites.

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Mr. Gurría, who acted as Secretary of Commerce in the timesof Salinas, once said, in the frenzy of defamatory remarks thatoverwhelmed government functionaries beginning in 1994, thatthe Zapatistas were an Internet guerrilla. They were never a guer-rilla group, as I will examine below. And it was not they whoemployed the Internet. The image of Subcomandante Marcossending communiqués from the jungle by satellite cellphone wasalways a media invention cooked up with the same disqualifyingpurpose.

A librarian from California began, a few days after the upris-ing, the tradition of translating the communiqués to circulatethem in electronic networks. It was a personal and independentinitiative. In a decentralized, autonomous style, wthat to thisday characterizes the inner-workings of the web, initiatives ofthat kind continue to spread, be they personal or collective. Thelast formal recount that I have news of is from the 9th of March,2002. Google reported 5,620 pages on the web associated withthe Zapatista Army of National Liberation. In addition to thepages are the references on the web, which are already beginningto number in the millions. Instead of decreasing, the number ofpeople who maintain those pages increases, and those who con-sult them even more so.

�Neither the web nor the texts, however, precisely illustratethe importance and vitality of the movement. The mobiliza-tions directly aroused by Zapatista initiatives, starting witha few thousand at the beginning of 1994, and reaching mil-lions in the consulta of 1996 or the march of 2001, are liv-ing proof of the echo that Zapatismo finds among the people.Nor do they sufficiently illustrate its importance. The onlyway to appreciate it fully would be to arrive directly to theplaces where Zapatismo has a real existence, which is to say,the communities and neighborhoods, in Mexico and in therest of the world. No matter how much academics and ac-tivists attempt to do so, it has become impossible. There isno longer a way to count. What is interesting is that in search-ing one always finds something: wherever one lands, even inthe most unexpected of places, Zapatismo appears.

�No one has dared to attribute to the Zapatistas the articula-tion of the prodigious transnational solidarity networks andthe mutual support that have emerged in the last ten years.

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But only an intolerable blindness, which unfortunately largesegments of our political classes seem to suffer, can negatethe weight that they have had in their creation, and continueto have as a cause for inspiration.

But the Zapatistas continue to be a mystery and a paradox. Canthere be such a thing as a revolutionary group with no interest inseizing power? Revolutionary leaders who refuse to hold any pub-lic post, now or in the future? An army that fires words and civildisobedience, championing non-violence? An organization pro-foundly rooted in its local culture with a global scope? A groupthat is strongly affiliated with democratic principles, and yet isdemocracy’s most radical critic? People profoundly rooted in an-cient Mayan traditions and yet immersed in contemporary ideas,problems, and technologies? “Everything for everyone, nothingfor us”, a principle daily applied in their initiatives, includes power:they don’t want power, even within their own communities, wherethe powers that be don’t dare to interfere. What kind of move-ment is this? Is it possible to apply to them, to their ideas andpractices, conventional or alternative notions of Power or power?Do they fit in the archetypal model of the Prince? The expression“national liberation” is included in the name they gave to theirmovement, but they seem to be radically different to the move-ments for national liberation of the post war era. How to dealwith their ideas and practices expressing their radical freedom,their fascinating notion of liberty and liberation?

One of the reasons why so many seem to want to forgetzapatism, to send it to the past or to reduce it to a few munici-palities in Chiapas, is the depth of their radicalism. TheZapatistas challenge in words and deeds every aspect of thecontemporary society. In revealing the root cause of the cur-rent predicaments, they tear to tatters the framework of theeconomic society (capitalism), the nation-state, formal democ-racy and all modern institutions. They also render obsoleteconventional ways and practices of social and political move-ments and initiatives. In reconstructing the world from thebottom up, they reveal the illusory or counterproductive na-ture of changes conceived or implemented from the top down.Their path encourages everywhere resistance to globalizationand neoliberalism, and inspires struggles for liberation. Theyalso contribute to articulate those struggles.

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In my view, however, there is nothing about the Zapatistasmore important their contribution to hope and imagination.

The Mahabharata, the sacred book of India, captured a veryancient tradition by putting hope at the beginning of all time.

Whence, however, does Hope arise?...Hope is the sheet-anchorof every man. When hope is destroyed, great grief follows which,forsooth, is almost equal to death itself…I think that Hope isbigger than a mountain with all its trees. Or, perhaps, it is biggerthan the sky itself. Or perhaps, O King, it is really inmmeasurable.Hope, O Chief of kurus, is highly difficult of being understoodand equally difficult of being conquered. Seeing this last attributeof Hope, I ask, what else is so unconquerable as this? (TheMahabharata, Vol. XII, p.186).

When hope is destroyed, grief is like your own death…Thirty years ago Ivan Illich wrote, towards the end of

Deschooling society, the book that made him famous:

The Promethean ethos has now eclipsed hope. Survival of the humanrace depends on its rediscovery as a social force. (Illich 1996, 105).

That is exactly what the Zapatistas have done. In March 1994, an-swering a child who wrote to them from Baja California, they ac-knowledged that they were professionals, but not of violence, asthe government affirmed. “We are professionals of hope”, they said.

Pan-Dora, the All-Giver, closed the lid of her amphora be-fore Hope could escape. It is time to reclaim it, in the era inwhich the Promethean ethos threaten to destroy the world andthe expectations it generated vanish one after the other. In liber-ating hope from their intellectual and political prison, theZapatistas created the possibility of a renaissance, which is nowemerging in the net of plural paths they discovered or is dailyinvented by the imagination they awakened and made brighter.They are still a source of inspiration for those walking alongthose paths. But they do not pretend to administer or controlsuch a net, which has its own impulses, strength and orienta-tion. We all are, or can be, Zapatistas.

Behind our black mask, behind our armed voice, behind ourunnamable name, behind what you see of us, behind this, we are

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you. Behind this, we are the same simple and ordinary men andwomen who are repeated in all races, painted in all colors, speakin all languages, and live in all places. Behind this, we arethe same forgotten men and women,the same excluded,the same intolerated,the same persecuted,the same as you. Behind this, we are you.1

¡Basta! Enough!

At midnight of 1st January 1994, NAFTA –the North AmericanFree Trade Agreement between Mexico, the US and Canada–came into force. Barely two hours later, thousands of Indiansarmed with machetes, clubs and a few guns occupied four of themain towns in Chiapas, a Mexico’s province bordering Guate-mala, and declared war on the Mexican government. The rebelsrevealed that they were Indians of different ethnic groups callingthemselves Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN).They appealed for an end to 500 years of oppression and 50 yearsof “development”, and expressed the hope that a new politicalregime would allow them to reclaim their commons and to regen-erate their own forms of governance and their art of living anddying. It was time to say “¡Basta! Enough!”

For ten years, encircled by 50-60 000 troops, a third of theMexican Army, the Zapatistas have peacefully resisted the warwaged against them by the government, which it has tried tohide behind all kinds of peace declarations and behind the un-bearable technical euphemism of a “low intensity war”.

The mystery of their condition persists. The controversy abouttheir character never become exhausted. And it becomes polemic,confrontation, when the point is to examine its prospects.

At this point, it seems pretty evident what the Zapatistas arenot:

�They are not a fundamentalist or messianic movement. Withintheir ranks, very different beliefs and religions, most of them

1 Welcoming words by the Comandancia General of EZLN, at the FirstIntercontinental Encounter for Humanity against Neoliberalism, spoken bythe respected major Ana María, on 27th July, 1996. The Zapatistas 1998, 24.

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well rooted in their traditions, harmoniously coexist. Theyare very open and ecumenical in religious matters.

�They are not an Indigenous or ethnic movement, even if mostof them belong to an Indigenous people. They do not reducethe scope of their initiative to Indigenous peoples, to a “mi-nority” or even less to themselves, to their own claims: “Ev-erything for everyone, nothing for us” is not a slogan but a po-litical attitude and practice.

�The Zapatistas are not a nationalist, separatist or “autono-mist” movement. They show no desire for Chiapas to be-come a small nation-state, an Indigenous republic, or an “au-tonomous” administrative district, in line with the demandsof minorities in some other countries. They actively resistthe modern propensity to subsume local ways of being andcultural differences in the homogenizing treatment given topeople classed as “minorities” in modern societies. Such pro-cedure is usually another way of hiding the discriminationcharacterizing them and deepening the individualism in whichthey are based.

�The Zapatistas are not guerrillas. They are not a fish that swimsin the sea of the people, as Che Guevara would define a guer-rilla. They are not a revolutionary group looking for popularsupport to seize power. They were born as the collective deci-sion of hundreds of communities not interested in seizing power.They are the sea, not the fish. This attitude is a continual sourceof confusion and debate, exposing them to a very intense con-troversy or rejection. I explore it later in this essay.

It seems to be clear what the Zapatistas are not. But, what iswhat they really are? How to describe and characterize their radi-cal political initiative?

Listening while you walk

“The first fundamental act of the EZLN was to learn how tolisten and to speak”, say the Zapatistas.2

On the 17th November 1983 a group of six professional revo-lutionaries arrived in Chiapas to establish a guerrilla centre and

2 Unless indicated otherwise, all the quotations come from the zapatistacommuniqués of July and August 2003.

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base. Their first task was to learn how to survive in the jungle bythemselves. After one year, the person later represented as oldAntonio discovered them and introduced them to the communi-ties. Their marxist-leninist-guevarist ideology could not permeatetheir conversations. “Your word is too harsh”, people kept tellingthem. The guerrillas “square” ideas were thus not only dented butso severely damaged that they became unrecognizable. The firstZapatistas say that in this initial confrontation they lost –they,those bearing that ideology and that political project, a would-beguerrilla in the Latin American tradition. But out of this intercul-tural dialogue Zapatismo was born and rooted itself in hundredsof communities.

In the following years, these communities tried every legaltool at their disposal, every form of social, economic or politicalorganization. They organized marches, sit-ins, everything. Theyeven walked two thousand kilometers from Chiapas to the capi-tal, Mexico City, in order to find someone to hear their call. Noone listened. Not the society and not the government. They weredying like flies. They thus preferred a dignified death to the docilemarch of sheep to the slaughter.

The mountain told us to take up arms so we would have a voice.It told us to cover our faces so we would have a face. It told us toforget our names so we could be named. It told us to protect ourpast so we would have a future. (The Zapatistas 1998, 22).

All they had been left with was their dignity. They affirmed them-selves in it, hoping that their sacrifice might awaken society; andthat perhaps their children and grandchildren could live a betterlife.

They were the weakest. Nobody was listening. But their up-rising was echoed by the ‘civil society’, which urged them to trya peaceful and political way. They accepted such a mandate andthey made themselves strong in it, changing the form of theirstruggle. Only 12 days after the armed uprising started, theybecame the champions of non violence.

According to the Zapatistas, after the Dialogue of the Ca-thedral in March 1994 (frustrated after the assassination of thepresidential candidate of the official party) and the elections ofthat year, they needed to create a different kind of space fordialogue:

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We needed a space to learn to listen and to speak with this plu-rality that we call ‘civil society’. We agreed then to construct suchspace and to call it Aguascalientes, since it would be the head-quarters of the National Democratic Convention, whose namealluded to the Convention of the Mexican revolutionary forces inthe second decade of the 20th Century... On 8th August 1996commander Tacho, in the name of the Revolutionary IndigenousClandestine Committee of the EZLN inaugurated, before sixthousand people from different parts of the world, the so calledAguascalientes and he delivered it to national and internationalcivil society... But the idea of Aguascalientes was going más allá,beyond. We wanted a space for the dialogue with civil society.And dialogue means also to learn to listen to the other and learn-ing how to speak to him or her.

In February 1995, after the frustrated ambush to the Zapatistacomandantes prepared by President Zedillo, the army destroyedthe Aguascalientes of Guadalupe Tepeyac. A little later otherAguascalientes were born in different Zapatista communities.They served since then many purposes, especially for the rela-tionship with ‘civil society’.

In December 1995 autonomous municipalities started to becreated in the Zapatista area. In them, in spite of the militaryencirclement and other external pressures, the Zapatistas prac-ticed their autonomy, both within each of the communities con-stituting every municipality and within each municipality, wherethe communities organized and controlled a governing council.

After a long reflection on these experiences, the Zapatistasintroduced important changes in their internal structure and intheir ways of relating to ‘civil society’. In order to inform aboutthem, burying the Aguascalientes and giving birth to the caracoles(snails, seashells), they held a great celebration from 8th to 10th

August 2003.Internally they decided to separate the military structure from

the civil organization and to harmonize the activities of the au-tonomous municipalities in every Zapatista region through Jun-tas de Buen Gobierno (Councils or Boards of Good Govern-ment). These new autonomous bodies were created

to take care that in Zapatista territory those that lead, lead byfollowing... In each rebel area there will be a Junta, constituted by

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one or two delegates of each of the Autonomous Councils (of themunicipalities) of the area.

The autonomous communities and municipalities will thus con-tinue functioning with their own structure, but now they willalso have these Juntas de Buen Gobierno, articulating severalmunicipalities. The Juntas will attend to conflicts and difficul-ties of the autonomous municipalities within the jurisdiction ofeach Junta. Anyone feeling that an injustice has been committedin his or her community or municipality, or that things are notbeing done like they ought to be done, according to the commu-nity will and the principle of command by obeying, may haverecourse to this new instance. These Juntas will also be in chargeof any dealings with ‘civil society’ and if needed with govern-ment agencies.

Why call the new political bodies caracoles? (Caracol: conchshell). The Zapatistas offered different explanations.

The wise ones of olden times say that the hearts of men andwomen are in the shape of a caracol, and that those who havegood in their hearts and thoughts walk from one place to theother, awakening gods and men for them to check that the worldremains right. For that reason, who keeps vigil while the othersare sleeping uses his caracol, and he uses it for many things, butmost of all as not to forget.They say here that the most ancient ones said that others beforethem said that the very first people of these lands held an apprecia-tion for the symbol of the caracol. They say, that they say, that theysaid that the caracol represents entering into the heart, that this iswhat the very first one’s called knowledge. They say that they saythat they said that the caracol also represents exiting from the heartto walk the world, that this is what the very first called life. Andnot only, they say that they say that they said that with the caracolthe community was called together for the word to travel from one tothe other and thus accord were born. And also they say that they saythat they said that the caracol was a gift for the ear to hear even themost distant words. This they say that they say, that they said.The caracoles will be like doors to enter into the communities andfor the communities to come out; like windows to see us inside andalso for us to see outside; like loudspeakers in order to send farand wide our word and also to hear the words from the one who

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is far away. But, most of all, they will remind us that we ought tokeep watch and to check uprightness of the worlds that populatethe world.

At the celebration that buried the Aguascalientes, and birthedthe caracoles, the Zapatistas announced that in their territoriesthe Plan Puebla-Panamá –a neoliberal scheme for SouthernMexico and Central America– would not be applied. They pro-posed instead the Plan La Realidad-Tijuana that “consists in link-ing all the resistances in our country, and reconstructing Mexicofrom the bottom up.”

As these highlights of the very complex story of Zapatismoillustrate, the Zapatistas do not enclose themselves in a body ofdoctrine, in an ideology, which usually starts as a guide to actionand ends transmogrified into a rigid and authoritarian straight-jacket. They have changed continually, enriching their statementsand ways, according with changing circumstances and followingtheir intense interaction with other groups and organizations.They listen, learn from others and apply in each step a healthyself-criticism. Yet this is not mere pragmatism. They continue tobe solidly attached to certain principles of behavior and theypossess a splendid moral integrity. They also possess the strengthof character that emanates from a well rooted, open and hospi-table dignity.

There are few things more distinctive of the Zapatistas thattheir capacity to listen...and to change, according to what theyheard, operating profound mutations in their movement. Whatsome people see as chameleonic behavior or betrayal to sacredprinciples or doctrinaire statements, is instead an expression ofvitality, flexibility, openness and capacity to change. This is thechallenge in describing Zapatismo. You need to allude to themutations of the subject itself and its attitudes.

Desperately Seeking Marcos

Many people still insist on reducing Zapatismo to Marcos. Thislooks like racism. An educated white man is surely manipulatingthose poor, illiterate Mayas. They cannot say what he is sayingand even less conceive such a movement. This looks like racism.

But, what about the crowds? In 2001 Subcomandante Marcosand 25 Zapatista commanders traveled to Mexico City. For the first

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time, millions were able to see and hear them. Time and again thecrowds did not allow the other Zapatistas or local Indigenous lead-ers to speak. “Marcos! Marcos!” they demanded. No one else. Theywanted to listen to him. Were they also racists?

In the plaza of Tepatepec, Hidalgo, a new legend started.For two years not a drop of water had fallen in the region. Thevery minute Marcos started his speech a torrential rain began.“Of course,” said an old woman; “This man is turning our politi-cal system upside down. Why shouldn’t he command the rain?”Was she racist? Or just an innocent searcher looking for hopeincarnated in a charismatic leader?

And what about the millions collecting the Zapatistacommuniqués penned by Marcos, his stories, his interviews, hisletters? What about the editors publishing with impressive loveand care his “selected writings”? (Subcomandante Marcos 2001)The book, with a Foreword by Saramago, celebrates him as one ofthe best Latin American writers of all times. Norman Mailer writes,in the cover of that book: “Marcos has earned his indignation likefew men alive”. Are these admirers racists as well?

Should we think, alternatively, that the “system” performedits usual operation and did not wait 30 years to sell Marcos T-shirts? (Benetton offered him one million dollars to include hisface in its collection.) Or should we accept the view that he reallyis the timely savior that the world was waiting for; an icon thatglobaphobics can now use to express their dissent; the new flag forrebellion in these desperate times? Is Marcos the romantic revolu-tionary, a living substitute for Che? Is he really an extraordinaryleader, as wise as he is heroic, awakening us out of confusion andconformity, and thus deserving trust and subordination?

No doubt, the person behind the mask is extraordinary. Whocan deny his literary talent? Even the very anti-Zapatista NobelPrize winner, Octavio Paz, recognized it. No one can questionhis political savvy. Loved and hated by many people, Marcos,like the Zapatistas, remains a mystery and a paradox, a puzzle.Does he really fit into the image of a new revolutionary arche-type? Unquestionably, he has charisma. He enchants both thecrowds and his readers. But, is he really a leader, romantic ornot? And even more pertinent to the point, is he the very core ofZapatismo, as Mao was for Maoism and Che for Guevarism? Isthis particular poet-writer-strategist-rebel-revolutionary whatmany of his followers and readers seem to assume him to be?

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During the Zapatista March to Mexico City, Marcos experi-enced for the first time his mesmerizing impact on the crowds.The phenomenon is in fact mysterious. He speaks in a very lowvoice, without exaltation, mocking himself all the time, alwaysending in an anti-climactic way his speeches. He looks as theopposite of any leader or demagogue. In person, it becomes veryevident how much he abhors a power position. Would this bethe secret of his fascination for an audience tired of the rhetoricand attitudes of politicians and publicists?

Anyway, he candidly declared afterwards that the Zapatistasdid not foresee this problem. Marcos became their spokesper-son by accident, at the beginning of the uprising. Observing hiseffectiveness, they used him extensively in that role. The maskused to avoid personality cult, became counterproductive. Histransformation into an iconic image took them by surprise.

I do not want to minimize his role as a spokesperson. It hasbeen critical to overcome one of the main challenges for theZapatistas. Fully rooted in their own culture, they were keenlyaware that their radical otherness was an obstacle to convey toothers the spirit and meaning of their movement, without be-traying their unique view of the world. How to avoid misinter-pretation? How to be truthful without colonizing others withtheir brand of truth? How to share an attitude whose ‘global’scope derived from its deep cultural rootedness in Chiapas?

Few Zapatistas are proficient in Spanish; none, but Marcos,masters it. But the challenge for effective interaction was notonly a question of language. It was associated with the very con-ception and orientation of the movement, whose radical nov-elty comes from both its ancient cultural roots and its contem-porary innovations. Their views, fully immersed in their owncultures, seemed impenetrable for people of other cultures. Theirpolitical stance, strictly contemporary, was conceived outsidethe modern political spectrum. It has no clear precedents. Therewere no words to talk about it.

This challenge was evident since the uprising started. TheZapatistas needed to draw a line to differentiate themselves fromother armed movements in Latin America, the narco-guerrillas,and classic peasant rebellions. Through very effective images,using both ordinary language and the epic tone of some prede-cessors, they appealed to people’s imagination. Many analyststook the document with which they introduced themselves for a

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delirious and politically insane declaration. Instead, the peoplereceived it a sign of hope, inspiring and awaking them. In a mat-ter of hours the Zapatistas established themselves in a new do-main, outside the spectrum of classifications that scholars, ana-lysts and reactionaries would try to pigeon hole them in.

After ten years of clandestineness, well trained in the inter-cultural dialogue through which Zapatismo was born, theZapatistas and Marcos himself discovered his function as a cul-tural bridge, in order to open a dialogue with ‘civil society’ andspread the contagion of dignity and hope. Instead of a cold,abstract ideology, frozen in seductive slogans, Marcos used im-ages, stories, metaphors and characters like Durito and old An-tonio. He was not selling any political code or ideology “to plugeveryone into”. In this way, his masked voice became the voiceof many voices.

Marcos himself explained “the futility for scientists and thepolice of speculating over who is behind the criminal nose andski mask” (Gilly et al. 1995, Marcos 2001, 249). The Zapatistasshow themselves by hiding and hide by showing themselves. Theyare the face that hides itself to be seen, the name that hidesitself to be named. It is futile to look both for the individual“author” of plans and conceptions, or for the “real” individualself behind the nosed ski mask. Marcos, born on January 1st1994, will soon vanish. It will no longer be needed; it will not,like Cid or Che, win battles after death; it will not be used as acredential legitimizing power.

Today, the Zapatistas are a source of inspiration, not of guid-ance. Zapatismo escapes all isms. They do not ask the people toaffiliate themselves to a church, a party, an ideology, a politicalstrategy or plan. They inspire dignity, courage and self-respect.They nourish with their moral strength and political imaginationnon-violent initiatives against neoliberalism and globalization.

Both the system and its discontents use Marcos. Bycriminalizing or idealizing the “individual” behind the mask, theydissipate precisely what they try to take hold of. They are thusunable to see with new eyes the Zapatistas’ radical stance.

Many others, however, derive continual inspiration fromthem. They do not need to desperately seek Marcos and idolizehim. They know that we all are Marcos, in our own way andplace, with our own face and dignity, in our own struggle. As theparticipants in the Zapatista Encuentro of 1996 declared,

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The rebels search each other out. They walk towards oneanother…They begin to recognize themselves…and continue ontheir fatiguing walk, walking as is now necessary to walk, that isto say, struggling…(The Zapatistas 1998, 43).

In the literature generated by the Zapatistas, through their spokes-person, allusions to legends and stories often appear. Don Duritode la Lacandona, an audacious and enlightened beetle who givescontemporary meaning to Don Quixote (the Subcomandante wouldbe his Sancho Panza), was “a memorable literary creation” forOctavio Paz, the Nobel Prize. The fictional encounters with “oldAntonio” allow us to follow, through his stories and allegories, thethreads of Indigenous communal wisdom. They operate as a bridgethat allows the urban modern mentality, more or less westernized,to take a look at the mystery of alternative worldviews which arebeyond its conceptual system. One advantage of a bridge is thatit allows walking in both directions.

There is something more. Certain things can only be saidpoetically. Sometimes, you need to tell them that way to pre-vent their immediate transmogrification by the media. Othertimes because there is no other way to tell them: as the dia-logue among cultures require to transcend the logos of theparties in dialogue and their corresponding conceptual systems,only poetry, appealing to the heart more than to the mind, canconstruct an intercultural bridge which can be crossed by ev-eryone. Finally, as conventional words and formal categoriesare increasingly opaque; as the dominant discourse to whichthey belong prevent to see the reality, instead of illuminatingit; as the novelty of what you want to say escape from all theavailable theoretical frameworks, to tell it poetically can bethe only option. From the arguments you can only derive con-clusions, Illich used to say; only stories make sense.

Of course, you need to be aware that, as the American poetRobert Duncan has observed,

Time and time again men have chickened out in the fear of whatthe genius of poetry demands of them. Poetry was brought toheel and made obedient to the criteria of rational discourse andits old role as a vehicle of vision and prophesy suppressed.

For Duncan,

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if a poet is not a seer, he or she is not a poet. (Simic 2004, 18).

A prophet is not someone with a crystal ball to fortune telling ora geomantic, but a person perceiving lucidly and in depth thepresent, and thus capable of anticipating possibility, trends, open-ings. In order to share with others what the Zapatistas thought,felt and were doing, there was no other way but poetry, in any ofits forms. And this is what Marcos contributed to prepare, al-though he was not the only poet in the group.

Walking at the pace of the slowest

All the “revolutionary vanguards” are obsessively focused on keep-ing their position of leadership and command. They must be atthe top and control, by all means, the ‘masses’. And they alwaysare in a rush. They have to be the first to arrive in the PromisedLand, which usually means seizing Power. Once in Power, theythink, they will be able to lead the people in the realization oftheir revolutionary project.

The Zapatistas are instead focused on seeking consensus andwalking at the pace of the slowest. No important political deci-sion is taken by a small group of leaders. As a consequence, thedecision process is slow and complex. It requires long and con-voluted forms of discussion and consultation. They do not speedit up through the method of voting, which always leaves a bal-ance of winners and losers, majorities and minorities. And themarch itself, walking the consensual path, is unavoidably slow.

Such search for consensus rejects the assumption of homoge-neity in the understanding of social subjects or issues, as well as inthe basic attitudes of the assembled people, implicit in conven-tional “democratic consensus”. The ballot box for referenda, plebi-scite and elections are not only exposed to manipulation and con-trol; they are also based on the assumption that everyone shares acommon understanding of the matters to be voted for and thatthe voters also share some basic attitudes determining the “demo-cratic consensus” constructed through their votes.

Fully aware of the many differences in the plurality of inter-ests, perceptions, attitudes and voices of the real world, theZapatistas try to identify by consensus the paths to be walked.And in walking them, once agreed upon by everyone, they adjustthe pace of the walk to those lagging behind. The slowest, on

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their part, have been accelerating their pace, as they see the in-stitutional roof falling over them.

At the same time, while walking that path, the Zapatistas areresorting to legal and political procedures, in order to constructanother level of consensus. They seem convinced that those pro-cedures, structurally embedded one to the other, constitute andexpress the forms of freedom throughout history. This would beone of the many paradoxes defining Zapatismo. They reject vot-ing in critical decisions, for consensus to be slowly forged in eachof their communities and regions, and periodically explore pos-sible consensus, at a wider scale, through procedures using thevote, whose results are affirmed and ratified or denied and recti-fied when they reach the communities. This is not a contradic-tion. The two forms nourish and complement each other in theirinterplay. I explore this aspect in the appendix.

The Zapatistas insist that they are rebels, not revolutionaries.Perhaps they are right. The true revolutionaries would be thoseordinary men and women whose dignified rebellion, often inspiredby the Zapatistas, would be producing a radical change at thegrassroots. Such a change has not yet crystallized in enduring in-stitutions, but seems to have very solid foundations. It is perhapsthe first social revolution of the XXI century: the revolution ofthe new commons (Esteva and Prakash 1998, Esteva 2000).

Democracy? Presence and representation

During their First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity andAgainst Neoliberalism, in July-August, 1996, SubcomandanteMarcos explained, in an informal intervention, the attitude of theZapatistas about power when they were preparing the uprising:

We thought that we needed to reformulate the question of power.We will not repeat the formula that to change the world you needto seize power, and once in power you will organize it the way itis the best for the world, that is, what is the best for me, becauseI am in power. We thought that if we conceived a change in thepremise of the question of power, arguing that we did not wantto take it, this would produce a different form of politics, anotherkind of politicians, other human beings who could make politicsvery different to the one practiced by the politicians we suffer todayalong the whole political spectrum”. (EZLN 1996, 69).

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On 1st January, 1996, in their 4th Declaration of Selva Lacandona,the Zapatistas invited everyone to explore at the local level whatthe people can do without political parties and the government.For the Zapatistas, the question is not who is in Power, or howany person, group or party got a power position (through elec-tions or other means), but the very nature of the power system.

In distancing themselves from the guerrilla tradition, theZapatistas observed that it always postponed the question ofpeople’s position and role.

There is an oppressive power which up there decides in the nameof the society, and a group of “visionaries” decides to conduct thecountry through the right path and ousts the group in power, seizeit and also decides in the name of the society. For us that is astruggle of hegemonies… It is not possible to rebuild the world,the society, or the nation states currently destroyed, through a dis-pute around who will impose its hegemony on the society. (Sub-comandante Marcos, in interview with García Márquez,March 2001, in Lopes 2004).

Everybody begins to recognize that the electoral procedures requireeverywhere a profound and complete reform, in order to give backto them credibility and legitimacy. The Zapatistas do not believethat those reforms will be enough to address the problems embed-ded in the very structure of the ‘democratic’ nation-state. They donot think that the needed changes should, or can, come from above.They think instead that those changes can only be realized with thetransformation of the society by itself, from within, in people’s so-cial fabric in communities, barrios, municipalities.

Democracy, in fact, can only be where the people are, andnot “up there” at the top of the institutions, no matter how per-fect the procedures to elect representatives who will shape andoperate those institutions could be. Instead of putting their trustin the constituted powers, whose legitimacy they question, theZapatistas deposit their hope in the ‘constituent force’, the forceconstituting the constituted powers, the one that can give, ornot, life, meaning and substance to them. Zapatismo has been,from the very beginning, an open appeal to this ‘constituent force’of the society, an invitation to those forming it to directly andconsciously deal with social transformation, not through theirsupposed representatives.

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It is increasingly evident, everywhere, that the constitutedpowers are not respecting people’s will. The voices of 30 mil-lion people, for example, occupying the streets everywhere onFebruary 15th 2003, attempting to stop the war in the MiddleEast, were not heard. This situation generates increasing disen-chantment with formal democracy. It produces a feeling of im-potence. Many people react with apathy, indifference, even des-peration. Both to vote, or to abandon the ballot box, may beuseless or counterproductive.

The Zapatistas created an alternative path –a political force,instead of a political party, which transforms social and politicalreality at the grassroots and can enclose and corner the enclos-ers, the powers that be now enclosing and cornering the people;a force which can control and surround the constituted powersuntil it becomes possible to substitute them for really demo-cratic institutional mechanisms in a new political regime.

The Zapatistas know very well that their current struggleoccurs within the legal and political framework of the MexicanState. They do not live in Mars. But they are not trapped in theperverse illusion that the State is the only general political real-ity or a privileged form of political activity. They recover theconviction that politics is a commitment to the common good,as expressed in common sense, the sense held in the community.They take away from the State and the market the function ofdefining the good life and reclaim it as a faculty of ‘civil soci-ety’, i.e. the people. Far from seeing the State as the unique orprivileged political horizon, they perceive it as a structure ofdomination which should be marginalized and dissolved.

The Zapatistas are fully aware of the current debate aboutthe situation and prospects of the nation-state itself. They ob-serve that this modern invention, within which the economicsociety was organized and promoted in both capitalist and so-cialist forms, is now exposed to a two-pronged attack bytransnational forces and institutions, or by internal groups withethnic, religious or ideological claims. They know that some ex-perts consider that such attack would be dissolving the nationstates, whose time came to an end when they surrendered theirreal power and their legal faculties to private corporations. Someother experts think that the nation states are stronger than everand should fulfill more than ever their police function, to con-trol people’s resistance and rebellion. Most of the analysts rec-

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ognize that the nation states can no longer administer the na-tional economy, until recently their main function, because alleconomies have been transnationalized and no macronationalstructure, like the OMC, can be substitute for the states in thatfunction. While some see in this fact the beginning of the end ofthe nation state, as a political regime, some others consider thatwhat is needed is to reinforce the nation states, for them to beable to control those increasingly opposed to the new global dis-order. Still some others, in the left, retake their statist traditionsand demand to rebuild the State and its national sovereignty, forit to fulfill the function of transformation and redistribution.

As many other groups, everywhere, The Zapatistas seemclearly interested in the different notions of nation and state,abandoned after the creation of the nation-state, which differ-ent groups are now reclaiming. They appreciate the efforts at-tempting to transform the homogeneous state (monocultural ormulticultural) into a plural state, according to diverse concep-tions. But they have not committed their will or their discourseto any specific political design, suggested as a substitute for the‘democratic’ nation-state. They seem convinced that “society asa whole” (the general design of a society) is always the outcomeof a multiplicity of initiatives, forces, and impulses –not thefruit of social engineering or theoretical designs. They appeal tosociological and political imagination, while emphasizing thatwhat is really needed is the full participation of everyone, par-ticularly those until now excluded, in the concepts and practicesthat will give a new shape to the society and its political regime.

In their own regions, where they are in control, the Zapatistasseem to be clearing a path in which democracy means presence,rather than representation.

Beyond both universalism and relativism

The idea of One World is an old western dream, project and de-sign, whose origins can be traced back to the parable of theGood Samaritan and the Apostle Paul.

Ever since the apostle Paul had shattered the validity of worldlydistinctions in the face of God’s gift of salvation, it had becomethinkable to conceive of all humans as standing on the sameplane. The Enlightenment secularized this heritage and turned it

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into a humanist creed. Neither class nor sex, neither religion norrace count before human nature, as they didn’t count before God.Thus the universality of the Sonship of God was recast as theuniversality of human dignity. From then on, ‘humanity’ becamethe common denominator uniting all peoples, causing differencesin skin color, beliefs and social customs to decline in significance.(Sachs 1992, 103).

Accepting the assumption that there is a fundamental samenessin all human beings, the construction of One World was adoptedin the West as a moral obligation. It became a destructive andcolonizing adventure attempting to absorb and dissolve, in thesame movement, all the different traditions and forms of exist-ence on this planet. This old project, supported by all the formsof the cross and the sword, is now carried on under the US hege-mony. At the end of the Second World War, such hegemonyused the emblem of development (Esteva 1992). At the end ofthe cold war, when the myth of development was a frayed flag,a new emblem was introduced. Under the cloak of globalizationan almost universal culturicide is currently promoted, with moreviolence than ever, often with a genocidal character.

The current global project is economic in nature: it attemptsthe transmogrification of every man and women on Earth intohomo economicus, the possessive and competitive individual bornin the West, who is the social foundation of capitalism (and so-cialism), what makes possible the social relationships definingit. This economic project has a political face: formal or repre-sentative democracy. And a moral or ethical face: human rights.(When the economic project requires it, these ‘faces’ are aban-doned). (Esteva and Prakash 1998).

“Enough!” said the Zapatistas to all this. For centuries, theircommunities entrenched themselves in their own places, resist-ing colonizers and developers. Such cultural resistance often ex-pressed forms of localism or even fundamentalism. Throughatrocious experiences, the Zapatista communities learned thatin the era of globalization no localism will survive and no cul-tural resistance is enough. They also learned that capital has nowmore appetite than ever, but not enough stomach to digest allthose that it attempts to control. Millions of people, as a conse-quence, and clearly most Indigenous people, are becoming dis-pensable.

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The Zapatistas transformed their resistance into a strugglefor liberation. They remembered the experience of EmilianoZapata, who gave them their name. In 1914, when the peasantand Indigenous armies occupied Mexico’s capital, after the de-feat of the dictatorship bringing them to extinction, Zapata andVilla, the two main leaders of the revolution, fell into perplex-ity. Their uprising was not to seize power and govern the coun-try. They wanted Land and Freedom. They thus came back totheir own places, dismantled the haciendas of the big landownersexploiting them and started to enjoy the land and freedom theyconquered through their struggle. Four years later, both of themwere assassinated. True, thanks to the revolution most peasantsand Indigenous people got some land, but step by step they lostfreedom and autonomy in the political regime established afterthe armed struggle.

Today’s Zapatistas, as the former, are not interested in seiz-ing power and governing the country. But they learned the les-son of their predecessors. They are clearly interested in the kindof regime to be established in the country. It should permanentlyand fully respect their land, their autonomy, they freedom, theirradical democracy. They do not attempt to impose on otherstheir own conceptions and ways. They only hope that such aregime would be really conceived and constructed by all Mexi-cans –not only a few, not only the elite or a revolutionary van-guard. And that such a regime can be defined by the harmoniouscoexistence of different peoples and cultures.

This position challenges the assumption that there is a fun-damental sameness in all “human beings”. There are human in-variants –what distinguishes us from other species– but not cul-tural universals: each culture perceives and conceives the worldand even those invariants in a different way. This radical rejec-tion of all forms of universalism does not imply to surrender tothe risky adventure of cultural relativism. It assumes instead,firmly and courageously, cultural relativity; the fact that no per-son or culture can assume or resume the totality of human expe-rience; that there are not one or many truths (truth is incom-mensurable); that the only legitimate, coherent and sensibleattitude before the real plurality of the world is radical pluralism(See Panikkar 1995, 1996, and Vachon 1995).

The Zapatistas resisted the secular, liberal temptation, of“liberating” themselves from their own culture in order to adopt

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some “universal” ideologies or values. Well affirmed in their owncultures and communities, they opened themselves to wide coa-litions of the discontented. Their localization is thus radically dif-ferent to both globalization and localism. It invites those stillsearching for a change in the frame of One World to create awhole new world, in which many worlds can be embraced. It isan invitation to go más allá (beyond) mere cultural resistance oreconomic or political claims (in a struggle for a bigger piece ofthe existing cake), towards an epic of transformation open tomany cultures. It is an invitation, not preaching or instructing. Itis not a sermon or a lesson, but a gesture.

The Zapatistas are fully aware that in the current situationany local reality is directly and immediately global, in the sensethat it is exposed to interaction with global forces and processes.To be deeply immersed in strictly local affairs, to rigorously dealand cope with them, in the way everyone wants and can do,implies dealing with the intertwining, interpenetration and in-terdependence of all localities. This kind of awareness has com-pelled many of the discontented with the neoliberal shape ofthe global project to conceive alternative globalizations. TheZapatistas resist such temptation. They are fully and deeply com-mitted with the articulation of all resistances, with wide coali-tions of the discontented, with the gathering of all rebellions.But they do not attempt to subsume all the struggles in a singledefinition of the present and the future, in a single doctrine,slogan or ideology. They are aware that the shared constructionof a real por-venir (the world to come) for all those discontented,increasingly dispensable for capital, can only be realized in aworld in which many worlds can be embraced. They know thatthe time has come to bury for ever the dream and project ofconstructing One World, which has been the pretext of allcolonialisms and today nourishes forms of fundamentalismwhose level of violence has no precedents. What is emerging,instead, can be expressed in the formula “One No, Many Yeses”(Midnight Notes 1997, Kingsnorth 2003).

Zapatistas and Zapatismo

The record of the Zapatista impact until now is pretty impres-sive.

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�The Zapatistas were a decisive factor in the dismantling ofthe oldest authoritarian regime in the world, Mexico’s ancientrégime.

�They created a political option before what looked as thedead end of globalization.

�The situation in Chiapas changed dramatically; thousand ofpeasants, mostly Indigenous, got the land they have beenstruggling for and a new balance of political forces is rede-fining the social fabric in that state.

�In the territories occupied by the Zapatistas, in spite of mili-tary encirclement and continual paramilitary threats, theyhave been doing what they said from the very beginning thatthey wanted to do: after reclaiming their commons, they areregenerating their own forms of governance and their art ofliving and dying. They have been able to operate autono-mously, improving their living conditions, without any kindof services or funds from the government. They are in factliving beyond the logic of the market and the State, beyondthe logic of capital, within a new social fabric. This does notimply, of course, to have escaped from the “capitalist socialfabric” defining Mexico and the world, whose dismantlingrequires to weave another social and political fabric, as theSixth Declaration of Selva Lacandona states.

�Thanks to the Zapatistas, autonomous municipalities flour-ishing in different parts of Mexico have now increasing vis-ibility and political space. Daily attitudes exhibiting Zapatistasigns are proliferating. The convening power of the Zapatistasgrew from the few thousands of the first week of 1994, tothe 3-4 millions for the national and international consulta-tion of 1996, to the more than 40 million (40% of Mexicanpopulation), for the 2001 March.

�All over the world, there are gestures, changes, mobiliza-tions, that seem to be inspired by the Zapatistas. The highlyvisible social movements against globalization, neoli-beralism, or war, quote the Zapatistas as source of inspira-tion and support them. Thousand of committees, which callthemselves “Zapatista committees”, operate across theworld. They were founded as an expression of solidarity withthe Zapatista cause. They are still ready to offer such soli-darity and some of them are actively engaged in doing some-thing with or for the Zapatistas. Most of them are rather

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involved in local or issue struggles: for their own dreams,projects, initiatives, or against a specific or general develop-ment or injustice: a dam, a road, a dumping ground, aMcDonalds... or a war, a policy, a government...

One must go back very far in history to find another politicalinitiative with similar global repercussions. As the Zapatistasthemselves already noted, what today looks as Zapatismo, walksas Zapatismo, speaks as Zapatismo and everything allows tothink that is Zapatismo, is no longer in the hands of theZapatistas.

The beginning…or the end?

While the Zapatistas affirm today that Zapatismo is stronger thanever, the political classes, the media, many analysts, even some sym-pathizers, are beginning to consider that the Zapatistas are history.Parallel to the extensive celebrations organized around the worldfor their 10th and 20th anniversary, there were many attempts toorganize their funeral. It was said that they failed as a social andpolitical movement. That far for an improvement, the material con-ditions of the Zapatista communities have deteriorated under theirleadership and control. That the Zapatistas are now increasinglyisolated in four municipalities in Chiapas, and are basically irrel-evant in the national or international political scene.

The Zapatistas have frequently used a very noisy “strategyof silence” which usually generates wide bewilderment, and sus-picions about their political death. They have radically aban-doned the conventional political arena. They openly reject allpolitical parties and refuse to have any contact with the govern-ment, both for its services or funds –which they reject– or for adialogue –since the government has not honored its word andsignature in the Accords of San Andrés.3 They refuse to partici-pate in the electoral process. All these elements contribute toexplain the conventional, reactionary or even sympathetic per-ception that the Zapatistas are history, that the peak of theirmovement and initiatives is over.

3 The Zapatistas and the Federal Goverment signed these Accords on February16, 1996, after a complex negotiation on Indigenous Rights.

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“Twenty years is very little. More is needed…”, said recentlymayor Moisés, one of the best known Zapatistas. ComandanteAbraham was more explicit: “20 years have thus elapsed. Butwe are just beginning”. “20 and ten”, says Subcomandante Marcos,“and those that will come…” (Muñoz 2003, 77). An illusion?The victory of optimism over reality? Are we in the initial phaseof Zapatismo or its time is over, it is history and the Zapatistamunicipalities will decay until their extinction?

The depth of the radicality of the Zapatistas, and at thesame time their amazing restraint, make it particularly difficultto appreciate their situation and prospects. But it is not impos-sible to characterize the meaning of their struggle and its im-pact during the first 10/20 years of its existence.

Words are windows of perception, matter of thought. De-pending upon the words we use, we see, we think, we act. Theyform the statements with which we govern ourselves and oth-ers. Words always enfleshed in their behavior have been the mainweapon of the Zapatistas. Using brilliantly and effectively theirwords, they have been dismantling the dominant discourse. Theycontinually undermine the institutional system of productionof the dominant statements, of the established “truth”. Theythus shake, peacefully and democratically, the very foundationof the existing Power/Knowledge system. While this systemhides within spectacular shows of strength its increasing fragil-ity, the Zapatistas exploits for their struggle its profound cracks,denounce it as a structure of domination and control, and beginthe construction of an alternative.

The importance of Zapatismo derives from its grassrootsradicality. (Esteva and Prakash 1998). It operates as a riverbedfor the flow of growing discontent with conventional organiza-tions, political parties, and governments, particularly to resistthe neoliberal globalization as the current form of capital ex-pansion.

The Zapatistas opposed globalization when it was univer-sally perceived as an ineluctable reality, a necessary path, a his-torical fact. By revealing, before anyone else, that the emperorhad no clothes, the Zapatistas awakened those intuiting the situ-ation and yet not daring to recognize it. In showing an alterna-tive, they created an opportunity to escape from the intellectualand political straitjacket in which the dominant “truths” hadtrapped us.

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The radical promise of the Zapatistas is not a new ideo-logical construction of possible futures. It is continually self-fulfilled in their deeds, in their daily behavior, as a redefini-tion of hope. Their position is not equivalent to expectation,as the conviction that something will turn out well. It ex-presses the conviction that something makes sense, regard-less of how it turns out. “Hope is that rejection of confor-mity and defeat” (The Zapatistas 1998, 13). Its name is alsodignity,

Dignity is that nation without nationality, that rainbow that isalso a bridge, that murmur of the heart no matter what bloodlives it, that rebel irreverence that mocks borders, customs, andwars. (The Zapatistas 1998, 13)

They are fully aware that “the expanding dignity of each manand each human relationship must necessarily challenge exist-ing systems” (Illich 1972, 18). Their localization is a feasibleand effective alternative to both localism and globalization.Their autonomy challenges the centralism of the state,marginalizes the economy and resists modern and capitalist in-dividualization promoted by both internal and external colo-nizers.

Rooted in their dignity, the Zapatistas have been erectingsome landmarks and signposts in what looks as a net of pluralpaths (Zapatismo). Whoever walks by these paths can see, withthe diffuse and intense quality of a rainbow, a large range ofpolitical perspectives that herald a new social order, beyond bothmodernity and post modernity (Esteva and Prakash 1998), be-yond the economic society (be it capitalist or socialist), beyondformal democracy and the nation state. Más allá (beyond) thecurrent conditions of the world and their intellectual, ideologi-cal and institutional underpinnings.

The Zapatistas are one in a kind, and at the same time typi-cal. They are ordinary men and women with an extraordinarybehavior. They are still mystery and paradox, as the grassrootsepic now running around the world.

The Zapatistas are no longer the Zapatismo circulating inthe world.

At the Intercontinental Encounter against Neoliberalism in1996, the Zapatistas told to all the participants that they were

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not together to change the world, something quite difficult ifnot impossible, but to create a whole new world. The phrase wasreceived with fascination and enthusiasm... but also skepticism:it appeared unfeasible and romantic. Step by step, however, assoon as many people started to escape from the dominant intel-lectual and ideological straightjackets, they discovered in them-selves a dignity similar to that of the Zapatistas and started towalk their own path.

Today’s Zapatismo is no longer in the hands of the Zapatistas.And those daily reinventing it may ignore that the Zapatista ini-tiatives are their original or current source of inspiration.

The transition to hope

I was talking with doña Trinidad, a magnificent old woman ofMorelia, one of the Zapatista communities most affected andharassed by both the military and the paramilitary. I wanted toknow how they were feeling in such difficult conditions. She toldme, smiling: “We are still hungry. We are still threatened andharassed. But now we have hope. And that changes everything”.I can imagine the terrible feeling of living under such atrociousoppression and thinking that your children and grandchildren willcontinue suffering it. If you can see the light at the end of thetunnel, if you can nourish some hope, restrictions become bear-able and life livable...

The Zapatistas have brought prosperity to the communities,if we reclaim the original meaning of the word: from the Latinpro spere, according to hope. In tzeltal, wisdom is to have in yourheart the strength to wait. For ten years they have organized theirown life with no dependence from the State, whose services,proposals, programs or projects they reject, and they have keptthe market at their margin, instead of hanging from it their veryexistence. They are still dealing with too many restrictions, noneof which is a novelty for them. But they have found the paththat allows them to overcome one by one of those restrictions,as they walk their path.

Hope is the very essence of popular movements (Lummis1996). Nonconformity and discontent are not enough. Neitheris enough critical awareness. People mobilize themselves whenthey think that their action may bring about a change, when theyhave hope.

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And hope, as Vaclav Havel used to say, is not the convictionthat something will happen, but that something makes sense,whatever happens.

San Pablo Etla, January 1st 2004

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Postscript:The Other Campaign

A LOT OF WATER has passed under the bridge in the two

years since I first wrote these notes. Among the Zapatistas, theconsolidation of their new social and political fabric allowedgiving to their insurrection the new form that they proclaimed inthe 6th Declaration of the Selva Lacandona on the last day ofthe 6th month of 2005. Within Mexico and the world, theunabating and deepening breakdown of the political classes andthe dominant institutions created dangers and opportunities with-out precedent.

The experience of theJuntas de Buen Gobierno

The report the Zapatistas presented in August, 2004, on theoperation of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno confirmed their usualstyle: they say what they do and they do what they say. It alsorevealed the impressive progress they have achieved in the tasksthey set for themselves and the no less impressive obstacles theyface.

Above all, the Juntas “are proof that Zapatismo doesn’t pre-tend to hegemonize or homogenize the world in which we livein either its ideas or its methods”. What they have been doing isproof that “in the Zapatista lands there is no aim to pulverizethe Mexican nation. On the contrary, it is here that the possibil-ity of its reconstruction is being born”. (La Jornada, 23-08-04).Indeed, the Zapatistas know that the constituted powers won’tfulfill the San Andres Accords. Through their implementation inthe Zapatista area the Zapatistas offer valid proofs that theydon’t produce the negative impacts which were used as pretextfor the constitutional counter-reform. Though it’s those same

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powers-that-be that haven’t fulfilled their commitments, civilsociety is also at fault for not putting enough pressure on them.

Given the continually increasing number of Zapatista ini-tiatives, which are always autonomous, it is not always possibleto determine their precise make-up. Are they only old wine innew bottles or radically new ideas in old wrappings? I don’t knowif they are learning by the independent means of trial and errorthe old path of development and therefore will soon need toredirect their path, or if in reality they have also reclaimed ‘verbs’,instead of ‘nouns’, and only by inertia are keeping the conven-tional packaging.

“Education” and “health”, for example, are words alludingto a bureaucratic and professional system, public or private, thatcreates dependence and subordination and is generally counter-productive: schools in the educational system produce ignorance;conventional medical care produces ill health. I have the im-pression that among the Zapatistas learning is more importantthan “education” and healing is more important than “health”.If you use verbs instead of nouns, you recover the initiative andbreak all dependence. No one can learn or heal for another andthis attitude, of taking charge of learning instead of being edu-cated, or of healing instead of being cured, clearly correspondswith the continuous exercise of dignity and autonomy that char-acterizes the Zapatistas. What appears time and again in theirpractice, when one observes them closely, is the rebellious au-tonomy that doesn’t yield or subordinate itself to intellectual,ideological, institutional or material straightjackets, though it maysometimes cover its initiatives under the mantel of conventionalterms.

All said and done, as the Junta de Buen Gobierno of theChiapas Highlands observed during the celebration of the firstyear of the Caracoles, it’s all about not being afraid of continu-ing to create autonomy, because

the indigenous villages should organize themselves and governthemselves, according to their own ways of thinking and under-standing, according to their interests, taking into account theircultures and traditions. (La Jornada, 10-08-04).

It’s Zapatismo, say the Zapatistas, that communities make theirdecisions at odds with the dominant regime.

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Ours is not a liberated territory nor a utopian commune. Neitheris it the experimental laboratory of an absurdity or a paradisefor an orphaned left. It’s a rebellious territory in resistance. (LaJornada, 2-10-04).

The Lacandona Commune, observes Luis Hernández,

is not a regime, but a practice…a laboratory of new socialrelations…[that] recovers old aspirations of the movements forself-emancipation: liberation should be the work of those it ben-efits, there oughtn’t be authorities over the people, the subjects ofthe social order must have full decision making capacity over theirdestinies. Their existence isn’t the expression of a moral nostal-gia, but the living expression of a new politics. (La Jornada 7-9-04).

In their own way, as usual, the Zapatistas continue to test thespeed of dreams, with a liberating spirit, accompanied from timeto time by those who come to learn and collaborate with them.In the period of the report of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno theseothers came from 43 countries and many regions of Mexico.

The experience of what they are doing does not adequatelyfit the terms that we use. The Zapatista practices continue an-cient traditions but at the same time they constitute a radicalnewness that is strictly contemporary.

The idea of government clearly implies people governingand people being governed, the division of society into thesetwo classes of people within the hollow of an oppressive re-gime. It assumes a conjunction of institutional mechanisms bywhich the governors are able to control the governed. Perhapsfor this reason, many indigenous communities don’t use thoseterms to describe their own authorities who don’t have thosesame characteristics. They only use these terms to allude to offi-cials or institutions of the government, at any level, which theyalways view as alien, imposing, and oppressive. In calling theirnew organs of expression for the collective will, Juntas de BuenGobierno (Boards of Good Government), the Zapatistas implicitlydenounce the Mal Gobierno (bad government) of the dominant struc-ture, but perhaps a new name will need to be invented to ex-press exactly what it means to “order while obeying” (mandarobedeciendo) —that the governed govern— and what specific

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“color” is taken by the hope that appears in the differentiatednames that the communities give to each Junta.

The June Jolts

In June, 2005, after the joyous announcement of the game withInter4, which brought them back to the front page of the news,the Zapatistas gave two jolts to the world.

The first was the coarse rebuff, simple and crude, of all thepresidential candidates and parties. The main jolt came later,with the “red alert”, when it was announced that all authoritieshad been evacuated from all Zapatista communities and theZapatistas liberated all those accompanying them from anyresponsability about their future actions, while the Defense Min-istry announced the destruction of thousands of hectares of poppyplants in the “area of influence” of the Zapatistas.5 Friends andenemies alike thought that fighting would once again break out.

The Zapatistas quickly prescribed a pill of tranquility by re-iterating that they would not use weapons with offensive intent.They explained that the evacuation operation had been orga-nized to protect their people while they undertook a consulta-tion on a political initiative that could possibly endanger every-thing they had achieved up to that time.

Those who have closely followed the evolution of theZapatistas and haven’t allowed themselves to be distracted bythe circus of the approaching presidential succession know thatthese surprises of June aren’t such big surprises at all. They arederived from a long process of consolidation of political optionsin the Selva Lacandona, which included a broad restructuring andcontinued analysis of the current context, which is characterizedby an ever increasing and general breakdown of the political classes.The three constitutional powers as well as the political partiesdeteriorate continually. The spectacle is pathetic and painful, notso much because there are many things worth saving in every-

4 The Zapatistas informed about their correspondence with the famous soccerteam, of Milan, to organize a tournament or at least a game between that teamand the Zapatista team.5 The Zapatistas, after collective decisions taken autonomously in their communitiesdon´t allow the use of alcohol or drugs in their territory and even less thecultivation of them.

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thing that is being broken down, but because of the consequencesof the mess. Since August, 2004, the Zapatistas have called forattentive observation of what is going on.

The relentless and frenzied dismantling of the nation state, drivenby a political class lacking professional capacities and decency(clearly accompanied in no few occasions by some of the mediaand all of the juridical system), will result in a chaotic nightmarethat not even primetime shows of suspense and terror could equal.(La Jornada, 20-08-04)

It is not an encouraging perspective, nor the breeding ground ofa revolution. It is not about a necessary and sensible transfor-mation for the progressive substitution of broken or useless partsin an obsolete machine. It is a turbulent and tense process inwhich the fragments of what used to be the Mexican politicalsystem try clumsily and uselessly to express themselves anew; orfight among themselves, clumsily and endlessly, guided by aneagerness to be rid of their rivals on a path which only in theillusions of those involved is an upward path. In fact, it has allthe aspects of approaching a precipice toward which all othernation states as well are heading, each one in its own way.

With a peculiar humor, in the communiqué that producedthe first jolt in June, subcomandante Marcos recalled the context:the war created by capitalism in the era of neoliberal globaliza-tion, what the Zapatistas have called the Fourth World War.

Amidst the rubble produced in this war of re-conquest lies theeconomic base, the material base, of the traditional nation-state…The tools and forms of traditional dominance have alsobeen destroyed or severely crippled… The destruction thus alsoreaches the traditional political classes. (June 20th)

Through the communiqué the Zapatistas drew a line. Theyshowed how electoral marketing pressures all the parties andcandidates to accommodate themselves within the ideologicalcenter. They outlined the characteristics of each party and thenfelt it necessary to define themselves. ‘Up there’, they denounced,

indecency, impudence, cynicism, and shamelessness rule…We feelrage and indignation seeing what we see, and we will fight to

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prevent these shameless people from getting their way. For it is thehour to begin to fight so that all those ‘up there’ that scorn historyand despise us will bear their reckoning and pay their dues.

No one was surprised at the distance the Zapatistas took in rela-tion to the PAN or the PRI, but the communiqué distressed thosewithin or near the ranks of the PRD who nurtured hopes thatthe Zapatistas would fall in line with the campaign of their can-didate or would at least leave him in peace. The strength andvirulence of the negation bothered them particularly.

The political classes and almost all the media adopted anelitist and dogmatic attitude towards the Sexta and showed rac-ism, ignorance and nearsightedness. Although by so doing theyinvoluntarily justified the Zapatistas, they thus made clear themagnitude of the risks the Zapatistas are taking. They are awarebased on their experience that the political classes may manu-facture any kind of outrage, including one that may endangereverything the Zapatistas have achieved up till now, if and whenthey feel the Zapatistas action as a threat.

While the first jolt persists, extends and deepens, the secondfinished in Zapatista style, with celebration at the lift of the“red alert”. The “normal” risks and pressures haven’t ceased,those coming from the military and paramilitary as much as thosecoming from the state and the market. “Normality” in Zapatistaterritory is a complete anomaly: they are a people in resistance,pursued relentlessly. But the suspicion that the Zapatistas an-ticipated an extermination maneuver (that the bulletin of theMinistry of Defense allowed us to suspect) or that they had de-cided to return to their original form of insurrection, with offen-sive use of their weapons, was dispelled. Far from being cor-nered or fugitive, as many suspected, the Zapatistas felt theywere strong enough to put forth the decisive challenge presentedin...

The Sixth (La Sexta)

The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle, in pure Zapatistastyle, clearly specified their intention

This is our simple word to tell you what our step has been andwhere we are right now, to explain how we view the world and

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our country, to say what we are thinking about doing and how weplan to do it, and to invite other people to take the steps with usin a large place called Mexico and an even larger place called theworld.

The Sixth is an effective synthesis of the years of Zapatistastruggle and of their present perception. There’s no way to sum-marize it and reading it carefully is indispensable. In it theZapatistas take the difficult initiative of articulating their visionto the thousands of organizations and millions of people thatserve in the ranks of the discontented, with the goal of trans-forming their current resistance, which perhaps is now givingthe most it can give, into a struggle for liberation. To unite them,the Zapatistas don’t use an abstract doctrine, a political mani-festo or a partisan hierarchical structure. They appeal to the rec-ognized moral strength of the people which alone will be able tocreate a favorable space for the meeting of “the different”, thosewho see the world through their own eyes.

In a strict sense, the Sixth simply reiterates what theZapatistas have said they would do since the beginning and havenot stopped doing. As I said earlier, ten years ago they liberatedthe hope that had been trapped in the cowardly or complicitaccommodation of all the parties to the neoliberal wave. Peoplestarted to walk with the Zapatistas on unprecedented paths. Manygroups, for example, accepted the challenge in the Fourth Dec-laration of Selva Lacandona: to walk without the political par-ties or the government, though perhaps no one really reached asfar the Zapatistas in whose territory the communities have gonefarther than ever before in creating their own life without gov-ernment support and at the margins of the parties. Time andagain the Zapatistas have tried not only to open themselves toothers but also to hand over the initiative to national and inter-national civil society, as they have explicitly proposed since theNational Democratic Convention of 1994, in their internationalencounters against neoliberalism, through their participation inthe National Indigenous Congress, the National LiberationZapatista Front, the March of Indigenous Dignity, the magazineRebeldía and through many other avenues. For diverse reasonsand circumstances they couldn’t directly participate in the ef-forts at organizational articulation. Today they have decided torun the risk of doing so.

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The Sixth is a challenge to the imagination, enabling the so-cial majorities to conceive a viable alternative to a corrupt re-gime based on violence, exploitation and oppression. Both thenation state and formal democracy are established on the premisethat we are competitive and violent individuals that can onlycoexist if we are controlled by the state which grants itself thesole monopoly on legitimate violence. The citizens’ struggle isthus reduced to participating in manipulated elections to choosethe people who will control them, to observing them and mak-ing them accountable (which they never are) and to changingthem periodically. That’s why we continue to be exposed to thebrutal and manifold violence of the regime that is supposed toprotect us from our own violence. The time has come to putanother regime in its place, joyfully and peacefully. That’s whatthe Zapatista initiative is about today.

The risks are huge and the Zapatistas aren’t exaggeratingwhen they say that they could lose everything they’ve achievedtill now.

�First of all, President Fox can try a “final solution” for theproblem he promised in his campaign he could solve in 15minutes. As he has done in other cases, he can twist the lawto order the arrest of the Zapatistas and use physical forceif it is “foreseeable” that the Zapatista initiative will set offacute turbulence in the middle of the electoral process andthe expected chaos that will characterize the end of his ad-ministration.

�The political parties and their members, sympathizers andallies may excessively resent the initiative of the Zapatistasand may employ their financial, social and media means toisolate and marginalize them, weakening the support thatthey have had till now. That is: they could intensify whatthey have unsuccessfully done for a decade.

�Many “sympathizers”, who had supported a Zapatismo thatthey perceived as the expression of marginalized, indigenousgroups struggling against a bad government, could step aside,disconcerted, once the anti-capitalist orientation of thestruggle has been openly established.

�Within the so-called left, where many militants are obsessedwith securing power, the usual savaging against those on yourown side could occur. Some of them will transform the

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Zapatistas into the principal enemy. That tendency was al-ready observed in some of the reactions to the Sixth, firstamong the “disillusioned”, who attempt to rationalize theirabandonment of the rank and file of what they saw asZapatismo, and later with those that were always “outside”,with certain reservations, and can now comfortably expressthemselves as “against”.6

To summarize, the risk is that the Zapatistas will remain alone,isolated, and in the end exposed to extermination. They are clearlyaware of that possibility. I think that despite all this they aretaking this initiative for consistency, because they trust thestrength of what they have woven in their own space, and per-haps because they have no other choice. The current situationdemands action. Only with the extension and contagion of thevirus of dignity will it be possible to affirm and consolidate whatis already there. Looking back on what has occurred during thelast 10 years, the Zapatistas cannot continue to wait for civilsociety to articulate and take the initiative. They will appeal tothe pockets of resistance that have been appearing everywhere,and with many of which they have established and maintainedcontact.

Reconstituting Ourselves

More than 30 years ago, Ivan Illich anticipated a condition likethe current one. He foresaw the moment in which the peoplewould lose confidence in the dominant institutions and the ad-ministrators of the crisis.

Over night significant institutions will lose all respectability, alllegitimacy, and their reputation for serving the public good. Ithappened to the Roman Church in the Reformation, to the Frenchmonarchy in 1793. In one night the unthinkable became obvious.(Illich. 1974, 198)

5 Note in march 2008. All these risks, anticipated in August 2006, apply today.Felipe Calderón seems to be attempting what President Fox did not dare to do(look for a “final solution”) and both the political parties and the so-called lefthave been isolating and disquialifying the Zapatistas.

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For some time, thought Illich, it might seem possible to patch upthe defects of the system in question.

No remedy is effective, but still ways are found to try them oneafter another. Governments think they can deal with the break-down of utilities, the disruption of the educational system, intol-erable transportation, the chaos of the judicial process, the vio-lent disaffection of the youth. Each aspect of the global crisis isdealt with as separate from all others, each is explained in itsown manner and treated particularly, each calls for a specific so-lution. Squabbles about alternative remedies give credibility tothe sectorial reform. (Ibídem)

For many years patches have been put on the system that is fall-ing apart. The pieces are continually moved around to create theillusion of change and generate the impression that the stabilityand coherence of the regime has been re-established. Both im-provised remedies and profound reforms, however, are increas-ingly counterproductive: they take the system to its limits andslowly bring all the dominant institutions to a precipice. Theclamor of everything that is falling apart obscures minds andprevents listening to reason, but this very process also weakensthose that were crushing and suffocating social groups and lim-iting their participation in the social order. The weakening ofcontrol disconcerts the controllers, who often behave like chick-ens with their heads cut off, and brings to power those peoplewho remain calm. According to Illich, these men and women, ofcalm disposition and warm heart, won’t be a nucleus of terror-ists nor devoted to a belief or ideology nor experts of a newkind. They will be examples and will inspire confidence in theircitizens by

showing that not only is it necessary, but it is possible, to install aconvivial society, on condition of conscious use of a disciplined pro-cess that recognizes the legitimacy of conflicting interests, the histori-cal precedent out of which the conflicts arose, and that gives credibleauthority to the decisions of ordinary men recognized by the commu-nity as their representatives. In a time of disaster, only a rootednessin history will give the necessary confidence to transform the present.The convivial use of process guarantees that an institutional revo-lution will remain a tool whose application engenders the ends sought.

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To appeal lucidly to process, in a spirit of continual opposition tobureaucracy, is the only possible protection against the revolutionitself becoming an institution. Whether the application of thisprocess to the inversion of all major institutions is then called acultural revolution, the recuperation of the formal structure of law,participatory socialism, or a return to the spirit of the Fueros deEspaña, is a matter of labeling. (Ibídem)

The Zapatistas have been demonstrating the feasibility of the al-ternative in their own territory in a manner very similar to the oneanticipated by Illich. It is important to highlight the way in whichthey have inverted the traditional revolutionary process by reject-ing the separation between ends and means, and recognizing, in-stead, as Illich said, that practice gives rise to the ends sought.

We don’t believe that the ends justify the means. Finally we thinkthe means are the end. We construct our objective at the same timethat we construct the means by which we go on struggling. In thatsense, the value we give to the spoken word, to honesty and tosincerity, is great, even though at times we may err ingenuously.(Subcomandante Marcos, in an interview with GarcíaMárquez, March 2001, reproduced in Lopes 2004, 149).

Illich based his anticipation on his awareness that the modernnation-state had been converted into a conglomerate of privateentities, formed by large national and international private cor-porations and by large bureaucratized unions. Periodically, po-litical parties convene all the shareholders to elect a new board.When the institutions that form the nation-state enter into acrisis, as they have now, a path is opened for reconstructing so-ciety…. in order to reconstitute it.

The loss of the legitimacy of the state, as a society based onstakeholders, doesn’t invalidate but affirms the need for constitu-tional procedure. The loss of credibility of the parties, convertedinto rival factions of stakeholders, doesn’t do anything but un-derline the importance of recourse to contradictory procedures inpolitics… (Ilich. 1974, 209)

Illich’s anticipation took time to become real. Instead of a suddendetonation, that he believed possible, junctures presented them-

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selves that prolonged the agony of the dominant regime andpermitted the marginalized to re-functionalize for their own pur-poses the decaying institutions. But we are now living the situa-tion that he foresaw, in the catastrophic form of the Fourth WorldWar, as the Zapatistas have called it. It is necessary to transformthat increasingly general catastrophe, which covers all spheresof reality, from the planetary environment to the privacy of ev-ery home, all submitting to a growing violence. It is necessary totransform it in to a crisis of transformation. The specific formalsign of this transformation may indeed be a constitutional pro-cess such as that put forth in the Sixth.

“The constitutional problems aren’t primarily problems oflaw but of power”, said Lasalle. Constitutions express the wayin which power is structured in a society.

Up until now, that structure has taking the form of a pyra-mid. The handful of dignitaries that invented the Mexican stateand wrote its first constitution shamelessly initiated the exclud-ing tradition of all our cartas magnas. They didn’t take into ac-count the indigenous peoples that then constituted the majorityof the population, because they believed, like Morelos, that itwas the “nation’s desire” to be governed by Spanish descendants(creoles). Only these, 3 per cent of the fledgling Mexicans, wouldbe heard, while the indigenous peoples were treated like for-eigners, thus empowering congress to negotiate trade treatieswith other nations and “Indian tribes.” That constitution alsoestablished that the “religion of the Mexican nation is and al-ways will be that of the Roman Catholic Church” and that “thenation protects it with just and wise laws and prohibits the fol-lowing of any other”. That “perpetual” religion of the state lastedonly a few decades. Another power structure rejected such aninsupportable notion, while those currently governing what re-mains of the country seem to look back on it with nostalgia.The indigenous and peasant armies that led the revolution hadto be listened to in 1917, but another group of dignitaries pro-duced legal formulas of compromise used since then to frus-trate the satisfaction of their claims.

There is ample consensus as to the necessity of providingourselves with a new constitution. The whims and fickleness ofsuccessive presidents have imposed hundreds of patches on theConstitution of 1917 rendering it profoundly incoherent and in-creasingly removed from the reality and aspirations of the Mexi-

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can people. Beneath the ample consensus mentioned, however,profound and fundamental differences exist. Within the politicalclasses the prevalent intention is to find a new compromise,through procedures like the failed Commission for the Reform ofthe State created by President Fox, in order to maintain the cur-rent structure of domination. In civil society, for the millions whoare discontented, the question is posed in completely differentterms. It means creating, for the first time, a set of norms forsocial relations that bases itself on the specific will of all thepeople, not the decisions of an assembly of dignitaries. That isthe current challenge that we can no longer continue to postpone.It is the challenge that the Zapatistas have posed for us.

Reclaiming the commons

The Mexican experience in this period will probably be studiedas the perfect laboratory for revealing the nature of modernpower, that is, the extent to which it depends on general percep-tions. Power operates based on certain statements that establishthe manner in which we govern ourselves and in which we ac-cept to be governed by others, and which also function as cer-tainties, pre-judices, guides for behavior. Only substantial changesin those statements reveal real changes in the “system of power”,but that kind of change isn’t reflected instantaneously and me-chanically in the institutional machinery, whose inertia can re-main dominant for long periods of time. (They can also becomeempty shells, with a certain ritualistic function, though the sub-stance has changed, as exemplified by the English monarchy.)What has happened in Mexico since 1994 is that a substantialnumber of the statements by which we governed ourselves ceasedto exist. The genius of the Zapatistas has consisted in makingthemselves the expression of general insights and common per-ceptions, giving them a new articulation. Well rooted in theirtraditions but open to contemporary reality, they changed thewords to verbs, to symbols of action.

We don’t have as yet the statements that will define the newregime of government (if we should still even use that expres-sion). That’s why the structures of power and the institutionalmachinery seem continually emptier and will therefore continueto fall, like the Berlin wall, until new statements can mold newinstitutions. That’s why the Zapatistas insist that they are only

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the prelude to change. They don’t want to function as the en-lightened vanguard of change, a new elite, making decisions foreveryone and trying to impose new statements. They know thattheir “truth” isn’t everyone’s and they hope that together wewill articulate a new truth.

How can we realize this dream? If the people can expressthemselves democratically, they tend to vote for things that goodsocialists call “petty bourgeois preferences”: a little more pornog-raphy and sports, more TV than reading… This is the reason whysocialists as much as liberals accepted that an elite or a vanguardguide the people and make decisions in their name. But the elitecorrupt easily. All of them have been corrupted. After the bank-ruptcy of state socialism and of all variants of the populist, lib-eral or welfare states, the authoritarian option once again beck-ons: governing by force and with the market could be the newname of the apocalypse. Or better yet: it is the same old namethat comes back at the moment all the masks come down. In acapitalist society it is only possible to govern by force; that’s whythe state grants itself a monopoly on “legitimate” force. Whatwas earlier hidden, among other things because of the competi-tion with socialism, is now confessed with cynicism. Governingby force… until the point is reached where it is no longer possibleto govern people or events, as is now the case.

Since the state naturally tends to be arbitrary and unjust, it isnecessary to stop it, to place limits on it. This seems to be thestarting point of a valid political position. In view of the failureof democratic processes to establish such limits, because they areas corrupted as the elite, communities have begun to emerge asalternatives. They emerge, more than anything, because theredoesn’t seem to be another option, but also because of the con-viction that the future will be, in some way or another, a commu-nity fact. Socialism bore a message of communitarianism, but itwas translated into collectivism, stateism and self-destruction.

Even those that accept the value and potential of communitiesdon’t believe them capable of simultaneously confronting the forces oftransnational corporations and the modern state. How can we resist theabstract logic of modern power, which seems to have escaped all pos-sibility of human control? The notion of power that pretends to con-struct itself democratically in the shape of a pyramid, in which it is thebase that counts, ends up discovering that it has the shape of a mush-room. (And here the implicit nuclear allusion clearly applies.)

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At the same time, the vacuity and fragility of the parapher-nalia of power is increasingly evident. The powerful can do lessand less, except when it comes to destruction. They administereconomic, military and political forces and they exhibit themcontinually, particularly in the media, to conserve what they stillhave of effective power. The story of the Wizard of Oz is per-haps the best parable of this condition of modern power. Afterhaving been able to pass through an extravagant display of illu-sions of power, Dorothy and her friends encounter a small andtimid man, trembling in fear. And the “powerful” wizard of Ozgently explains to them that they’ve come to ask from him whatthey already have: valor, intelligence, compassion.

A few years ago, I tried to share these insights with someSandinista leaders who had recently come to power. They lookedat me with pity: “In our hands we have the power that seemsillusory to you. We will use it for the benefit of the people, toimplement a revolution.” What did they have in their hands?The power of Somoza had three pillars: US support, the Na-tional Guard, and money. When the Sandinistas entered Somoza’sbunker, the US stopped supporting Nicaragua, the NationalGuard had been dissolved and Somoza’s money was in Miami.They caught only smoke in their hands. They had to rebuild thesystem of power and in the process they were corrupted andlost the confidence of the people, the confidence with whichthey could have organized society in a different way.

In showing that the Emperor was naked the Zapatistas hastenedthe fall of the political regime that had ruled for 70 years. They didn’ttry to convert themselves into its substitute. Instead they obstinatelydedicated themselves to reorganizing society from the bottom up,from within each community’s own proper space, and to extendingtheir networks horizontally towards all kinds of coalitions of the dis-contented. In this fashion they have been expanding and consolidat-ing autonomous spaces that define new commons.

The communities don’t seem capable of confronting theimmense economic and political forces that continue to assaultthem: the large transnational corporations and a State that theyfind ever more at the service of capital. Nevertheless, broadcoalitions of the discontented continue to extend themselves;they continue their slow accumulation of strength. You can seeon the horizon the conditions under which the political inver-sion of economic domination, of the structures of capital, could

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be undertaken. Without losing sight of reality, or more clearly,without underestimating the real risks of the circumstances, weshouldn’t let ourselves be dazzled by the fireworks of the con-stituted powers, national and international, including those ofthe “superpower” that finally accepts itself as an empire. In thefinal agonies of a regime, the last remaining forces are used toimpress the subjects, to make them believe that it is still what itwas… “Many things can be done with bayonets, except sittingon them”, said Napoleon. This repulsive image illustrates wellthe universal experience: with the army and the police it’s pos-sible to destroy and intimidate, but it is not possible to rule…unless the people allow fear to paralyze their heads and hearts.

It would be criminal to idolize misery. The new spaces forautonomy suffer extreme restrictions. But it would be equallycriminal not to take into account their capacity for innovation.They aren’t forms of mere survival or to secure a certain formof subsistence. They are contemporary forms of life, constitut-ing a sociological novelty that updates tradition and reevaluatesmodernity. They have been conceived in an era in which every-thing men and women need for their delight can be obtainedthrough technical means now available, and for an era in whichthe non-economic means to acquire what one needs will permitthose needs to be obtained freely and with dignity. These aremeans which leave behind the era in which the goal of unlim-ited improvement only concentrated privileges and imposed ev-ery kind of suffering on the social majorities, supposedly fortheir own good.

Back from promised futures, that make of the present analways postponed future, the Zapatis-tas confirm themselvesday after day in their surprising creation that we feel more andmore to be our own. I’m not able to see another avenue to es-cape from the horror that has been insinuating itself among usand that we are only capable of containing through communi-ties and their webs. The Sixth is our opportunity to articulateourselves with imagination and to walk hope.

The apparent infallibility of globalization clashes with the stub-born disobedience of reality. At the same time that neoliberalismpushes forward with its world-wide war, groups of nonconform-ists and nuclei of rebels are being formed all over the planet. Theempire of money confronts the rebellion of pockets of resistance.

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Yes, pockets. Of all sizes, of all colors, of the most varied forms.Their only similarity is their resistance to the “new world order”and the crime against humanity that accompanies the neoliberalwar. (EZLN Seven Missing Pieces from the Global Puzzle.June 1997)

The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocketis formed when two or more people are in agreement. The resis-tance is against the inhumanity of the new world economic order.The people that come together are the reader, myself and thoseabout whom these essays talk: Rembrandt, the ancient Egyp-tians, an expert in solitude within certain rooms of a hotel, dogsat nightfall, a man on a radio station. And unexpectedly, ourdialogue strengthens our conviction that what is happening to theworld today is wrong and what is often said about it is a lie.Never have I written a book with a greater sense of urgency.(John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket. Mexico: Era, 2002)

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Appendix

Civil Society

THE THEORETICAL and political history of the expression“civil society” is very complex and tangled. In the last 20 yearspeople have abandoned the academic and political tradition thathad defined it for two centuries and have redefined its meaningand uses. This redefinition was employed in Poland, the Philip-pines, Argentina and other countries to characterize the uncon-ventional actor that took apart authoritarian regimes. It was alsoused to allude to a “third sector”, to civil organizations that dis-tinguish themselves at the same time from the market (capital)and the state. It has been increasingly used to express autono-mous action of people at the grassroots, that doesn’t only distin-guish itself from capital and its state administrators but sets it-self against them. Unlike the Marxist tradition, which establishesa hierarchy among those opposing capital (the vanguard, indus-trial proletariat, classes subordinated to the proletariat, fellowtravelers, etc.), “civil society” maintains the horizontality of thedifferent peoples that define themselves by their resistance anddoesn’t demand declarations of faith. In Mexico, the heroic ac-tions of the victims of the earthquake of 1985 and of thosewithin the Zapatista insurrection have become benchmarks thatgive new content and perspective to the use of the expression,wich today identifies new forms of social resistance and politi-cal organization. (See Aubry 1994 and Esteva 2001).

Non-Violence

The profound mutation of the Zapatistas in relation to the useof weapons can be examined in Gandhian terms. For Gandhi,“non-violence is the supreme virtue and cowardice the worstvice”. The weak have no option but violence or passive resis-

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tance, the nonviolence of the weak. What is needed, assumedGandhi, is the nonviolence of the strong. He saw no reason for300 million Indians to be afraid of 150 thousand British. Be-cause they were many and thus strong, they should rely on non-violence. (See Gandhi, 1970, 170-174, 198). In this line of in-terpretation, the Zapatistas resisted falling into cowardice andwere ready to resort to violence when they were the weak, whenno one listened to them and they had no option but to use theirweapons, as they repeatedly said in the first days of their upris-ing. They were transformed into champions of nonviolence wheninsurrection within the civil society made them strong.

Wallerstein (2001) has compared Marcos to Gandhi andMandela. He thus emphasizes nonviolence and offers an inter-esting perspective, but his focus is particularly unfortunate inrelation to Zapatismo because it concentrates the attention andanalysis on the supposed leader. I think there are truly profoundlinks, very different from those Wallerstein sees, between Gandhiand the Zapatistas. Gandhi didn’t spend time planning and de-signing the future, he incorporated into the present what he per-ceived as embodied social ideals. In his struggle, Gandhi op-posed exploitation as much in capitalism as in socialism or inany other social organization in which a particular group or classcould exploit, discriminate or marginalize others in the name ofpublic or private property, religious principles, traditions or anyother thing. And Gandhi, finally, felt the need to practice all thathe preached, to embody it, to give it form and substance in hisown behavior, including, from the outset, living his criticism ofthe industrial mode of production and so-called Western Civili-zation. When he was asked what his message was, he replied“my life is my message”. And the entire world knows his famoussaying “Be the change you wish for the world”. That attitude,which embraces the three elements, is a precise description ofthe Zapatistas both in deeds and words.

Law and Liberty

For a period of ten years the Zapatistas have repeatedly chal-lenged the status quo and its legal form, like refuseniks and likeoutlaws, and each time, in the same operation, they have re-sorted to political and legal procedures. The best example is thatof January 1, 1994. There’s nothing more “illegal” than a decla-

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ration of war, but the Zapatistas framed the one they pronouncedagainst the Mexican government in constitutional terms: Article39 establishes “all public power comes from the people” and“the people have at all times the inalienable right of altering ormodifying the shape of its government”. It is a masterful patternthat can also be observed in the “revolutionary laws” applied inthe Zapatista Zones at the margin of national law, in the SanAndres Accords (the cornerstone of which is constitutional re-form) and in the Juntas de Buen Gobierno.

From the Leyes de Indias imposed by the Spanish, until todayin the sovereign state of Mexico, the law has always been em-ployed against the indigenous peoples. It has been, for 500 years,a tool to oppress and marginalize them. This past history is nowcombined with “judicial inflation”, a strictly contemporary pro-cess through which, increasingly, personal and collective con-flicts are taken to tribunals where they undergo a grotesquetransmogrification. The tribunals produce a mere illusion of jus-tice; they are entrusted to professionals who derive their dignityand income from the use and abuse of the law to obtain indi-vidual profits. The use of their professional capacity is clearlydetached from any consideration of the common good, the willof the people or authentic justice. Seven of every ten living law-yers can be found in the U.S. where they are legally bound to usethe law for the benefit of their clients, who may well be crimi-nals, even when doing so is openly against principles of justice.O. J. Simpson’s case has become a paradigm. To distinguish goodfrom bad it is necessary to resort to professional help which isbasically corrupt and put to the service of the highest bidder.

These horrors of a judicial system supposedly dedicated tothe administration of justice have become more and more pro-nounced. Justice is no longer the business of the highest court,though the word in usually in its name: Supreme Court of Jus-tice. The notion of justice has been reduced to the mechanicaland formal application of unjust laws. Judicial authorities ap-peal to the law when they cloak despotism in the mantle of showtribunals. Whether or not they recognize the aberrations whichare increasingly evident in the law, they maintain that while thelaw is the law, they have an obligation to apply it. As a conse-quence, they wash their hands of the atrocities, errors and stu-pidities of the judicial system, all of which appear to be outsidethe responsibility of legislative power.

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Far from abandoning this undermined territory, consideringthe terrible condition in which they find it, the Zapatistas havereclaimed it. They didn’t throw out the baby with the bath wa-ter. They are very aware of the necessity of appealing to theformal structure of a people, in order to denounce the cancer-ous hypertrophy of the dominant regime and to speak the truth,showing the aberration of this modern form of idolatry. Despiteits fragility, the word, the verb, the formal expression of legaland political proceedings, can reunite the multitude of men andwomen, those we call the people (el pueblo), in order to leavebehind the present state of things and continue with the workof reconstruction.

The structures of political and legal procedures are integral to oneanother. Both shape and express the structure of freedom in his-tory. If this is recognized, the framework of due process can beused as the most dramatic, symbolic, and convivial tool in thepolitical arena. The appeal to law remains powerful even wheresociety makes access to legal machinery a privilege, or where itsystematically denies justice, or where it cloaks despotism in themantle of show tribunals. (Illich, 1974, 209)

To protect the formal structure of liberty, the Zapatistas con-tinually appeal to legal and political procedures, fully consciousof what these procedures are and have been in the history of apeople and despite distortions and perversions imposed on themby successive structures of domination.

Multiculturalism and Pluralism

The notion of multiculturalism doesn’t change the homogeneouscharacter of the nation-state. The nation-state is based on theidea of a fundamental similarity, of a sameness and identity ofpossessive individuals, the “economic men” who are the funda-mental atoms of the social structure. Multiculturalism exilescultural differences to a secondary condition, an adjective. In-stead of confronting discrimination, multiculturalism aggravatesit. The plural state (not merely the multicultural one) is a step inthe appropriate direction; still, however, bound by the limita-tions and deficiencies inherent in the nation-state. (See Villoro1997 and 1998 and Esteva 2001). A coherent attitude toward a

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true plurality in the world takes the form of radical pluralism, asubject I cannot address here. (See Panikkar 1995 and Vachon1995)

An alternative global project?Is another world possible?

This theme of another world is the center of intense contro-versy as can be observed in the World Social Forum. The groupsthat maintain positions similar to that of the Zapatistas are inconstant tension with those that want one global alternative.Those coming to the forum reject the neoliberal world, but whilesome consider it imperative to conceive ONE alternative world(as the theme of the forum suggests) and they try to explain allforms of resistance in terms of the definition of that one alter-native world, ideology or dream, many groups want the articula-tion of the forum to act simply as a hinge that leaves an openingfor many possibilities.

The political transition in Mexico:alternation or regime change?

Mexico had the oldest authoritarian regime in the world. Theheirs of the revolutionaries of 1910, acting since 1928 throughthe dominant political party, governed the country for 70 years.They grew to constitute a constellation of mafia groups, self-styled the revolutionary family, that permeated all the structures ofsociety and government. The regime was a kind of renewablemonarchy that replaced the king every six years by means ofmanipulated and fraudulent elections. This regime has ended.

Because the current government has adopted the sameneoliberal orientation of its predecessors and labors within thesame inertial framework, the potential depth of the politicalchange has been jeopardized. Are we truly in a political transi-tion? Is there in reality a regime change? Or have we a mereface-lift that only promises the neoliberal “democratic normal-ization” of Mexico?

The ancient regime that characterized Mexican politics for 70years is effectively liquidated without hope of resurrection. Afew comparisons may illustrate the fact. When Miguel de laMadrid took office, the public sector represented two thirds of

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one of the most closed economies of the world. The state couldeffectively conduct and control the economy. President Fox nowdirects a public sector that represents one-fifth of one of themost open economies of the world and the major part of thepublic resources that he controls are inescapably committed. Hecan’t direct the economy. The political transformation is evendeeper. Within the ancient regime most of the political power hadbeen centered in the person of the president; all constitutedpowers were subordinated to him. And the mafia-like structureof the “system” controlled the most distant nooks and cranniesof the social fabric by way of the many tools of co-option, cor-ruption and repression that were available to those operatingthe system, and which they continually employed. The currentpresident doesn’t seem to have control of any of the consti-tuted powers… not of his own party nor even the presidentialresidence.

The peculiar hybrid nature of the Mexican regime, in eco-nomic and political terms, has been lost, and there is no possi-bility of its restoration. Even within the perverse and virtuallyimpossible scenario that the PRI were to take power again andreestablish full control of executive, legislative, and judicialpower in the Federation, the states and municipalities, the newgovernors would not control a political or economic structure atall similar to that of the past, much less be faced with a societyat all like those governed under earlier regimes. The old regimeis dead, although all kinds of pests still emanate from its unbur-ied body. It will not revive.

Whatever the depth of the change we see, to what or towhom do we owe it? Nobody credits the Zapatistas exclusively.Distinct forces struggled for many years against the authoritar-ian regime of what was called the PRI-government. Moreover,the regime itself undertook its own destruction through a seriesof more or less bloodless coups d’etat which started the dayMiguel de la Madrid took office as president. All that is clear. Asit is likewise clear that the Zapatista uprising produced a dra-matic change in the political balance of forces. The politicalopposition obtained from the government, a few weeks after theZapatista uprising, more concessions than in the previous 50years. None of the previous attempts at concessions, many ofthem recent, had managed to force the regime to grant any ofthem. The social and political reforms that Salinas had been re-

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sisting could only be initiated following the debilitating socialand political fracture created by the Zapatista insurrection.

The situation of former president Salinas illustrates the situ-ation well. In December 1993, he was at the peak of his glory.He was universally recognized as a global leader who under-stood the direction of the political winds sweeping the earth.He was lifting his country out of underdevelopment. He was thecandidate for director of the World Trade Organization, the in-stitution that quintessentially defines the era of globalization.Within the country, he held in his hands all the threads of politi-cal and economic power, succession assured, leaving everything“neatly wrapped-up”. A few months later…. Salinas found him-self obliged to “self-exile” himself in Ireland. His brother wentto jail. His policies, which had been universally celebrated, werequickly discredited. As a result of their prior application, how-ever, what the director of the FMI called “the first financial cri-sis of the 21st century” was produced. None of his innumerableattempts to return to the upper echelon of public life has suc-ceeded, although he has continued to move behind the scenesand did successfully secure his brother’s freedom.

Until December 1993, the political opposition had only man-aged to show slight variants to the left or right of the model andpath followed by Salinas. It seemed that, effectively, everythingconsisted in a perfecting of the “democratic processes of aneoliberal republic”, suitably fitted into the global pattern fa-vored by the Washington consensus.

The Zapatistas created a political option, unleashing at thegrassroots a broad mobilization which impeded the consolida-tion of the republic conceived in a US mold to replace the an-cient regime. The Zapatista initiative called into question the kindof regime that would emerge from the current transition. Con-ventional democratic competition among political parties —anovelty in Mexico— is now combined with struggles, oftenfierce, among the diverse mafia-like groups that remained fromthe PRI and within each of the parties. The fundamental break-down of the political classes has created conditions of instabil-ity and uncertainty that are very dangerous. No one can nowtake for granted that the dominant political forces will success-fully consolidate a neoliberal republic conforming to the USmodel. Nor can the option provided by the Zapatistas be takenfor granted as its replacement. But neither can this latter option

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be swept aside —although that is precisely what the media andpolitical parties continually try to do.

On the other hand, all the current political forces appear tobind themselves to one form or another of accommodation withworld globalization. In denying that perspective and creating analternative, the Zapatistas haven’t denied the reality of the in-ternationalization of capital, of the functioning of the worldmarket, of the global embedding of the mass media, or of theexistence of other global forces and phenomena: what they callthe Fourth World War. But in lucidly establishing the direct andimmediate connection between the global and the local, theywere the first to confront the globalist perspective and stand byan option that up till now they have advanced, and that awak-ens a growing interest in the world. The Basta Ya! has taken manyforms on the way, repeatedly exposing the current dilemma. In1999, for example, Subcoman-dante Marcos indicated “The worldfaces two options: Kosovo or Chiapas… At the end of this mil-lennium Chiapas and Kosovo demonstrate that it is the hour ofthose who differ, the hour of alternative, and the world must choose”(El Dia, 26th May, 1999). Globalization, whether conventionalor alternative, assumes homogenization, a uniform condition ora similarity taken as identity. Instead of assuming the real plu-rality of the world, all kinds of means are employed to dissolvedifferences, submerge them or suppress them, creating ONEworld, this one or that one… (The humanism that defines thisposition is every day more openly totalitarian). Chiapas, theZapatistas, create an option so that different people can livetogether without ceasing to be who they are. It is the positionsummed up in the motto: a world in which many worlds fit.

Class, Class Analysis, Class Organizations

There seems to be an intolerable contradiction between organiz-ing ourselves as a civil society and creating class organizations.The first would be liberal or reactionary with a Hegelian heritage,ideological confusion, paralysis, and attachment to the status quo.The second would be truly revolutionary with a Marxist-Leninistheritage (whether Trotskyite, Maoist, Guevarist or whatever), ex-pressive of ideological clarity and scientific rigor. Since the Na-tional Democratic Convention in 1994, this subject has growninto a fierce obstacle for the articulation of people´s efforts, dead-

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locking and stymieing those who would be united. It persists as anacute source of perplexity and confrontation among those whomilitate on the left of the ideological spectrum.

Classifying is a human gift, one of the human invariants. Wedo it continually, in applying our capacity to abstract, to men-tally separate the qualities of an object in order to consider themin isolation. This activity may become a threat, obsession ormania, but it constitutes a form of relationship and dialoguewith the real. I classify grains of corn in order to select those Iwill use for my next crop. I classify plants to select the ones I caneat. I classify the people I meet so that I will know how to ad-dress them; one does not address a child as one does a woman oran elder. One also classifies as an exercise of one’s power. Withplants, with animals, with people. If I have strength enough toimpose my will, my classification can turn into an exercise indomination. Via classification, as applied by man, comes theconcept of mass that despite its radical resonance has an eccle-siastic and bourgeois origin.

One of the most brilliant contributions of Marx was his no-tion of social class and his class analysis applied to capitalistsocieties. Up until today, it doesn’t seem possible to adequatelyunderstand what happens in the real world nor our condition init if we don’t rigorously apply the class analysis inherited fromMarx. Capital, or more accurately, capitalists, owners of themeans of production, with the support of government officialsat their service, have imposed social relationships that charac-terize the dominant regime of production, that subordinate usto them and allow them to exploit and repress us. These socialrelationships didn’t arise spontaneously, nor through an idyllic,natural and expedient evolution, as its defenders claim. Theywere imposed by means of violence and despite continuous re-sistance.

The discussion of social classes in a capitalistic society hasalways been the cause of intense debate. In the 1970’s an oldcontroversy centering on the condition of the peasants was re-vived. Conventional Marxism classified the peasants as petty-bourgeois or even reactionaries and in any case subordinatedthem to the industrial proletariat. The debate took place prima-rily among Marxists, who were classified, in relation to this sub-ject, as proletarists, de-proletarists and peasantists (proletaristas,desproletaristas y campesinistas). This controversy was parallel to

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the debate which aired between those who addressed the “indianquestion”. (Conventional Marxists referred to them as“ethnicists”). All these debates were related to distinct theoreti-cal and political positions concerned with correctly identifyingboth the actors involved in societal transformation and the struc-ture of their organizations.

In this setting the controversy over class organizations canbe examined. In confronting capitalists to dispute with them overtheir working conditions, industrial workers created specific or-ganizations, typically unions. Beyond any discussion of what hashappened to them, for example when they became, as has oftenhappened, corrupt instruments of the corporative power of thestate, it is evident that they have played a decisive role in im-proving the conditions of workers in capitalist society, in reduc-ing working hours, increasing salaries and other benefits, in ad-dressing abuses in the workplace, etcetera.

The fundamental problem, under the current circumstances,is not to analyze the class condition of diverse peoples or groupswithin capitalist society, which, although clearly essential, hasbeen well discussed and about which there is no real disputeamong those on the left. The issue at hand is the character ofautonomous organizations which are not simply reduced to dis-puting with capital (or with capitalists) in terms of “class inter-ests”, but which try to move forward on their own path, beyondthe logic of capital. This implies recognizing that “class organi-zations” are constituted according to what capital imposes onpeople. In a fundamental sense, by their own configuration, thoseorganizations are forced to dance to the tune that capital plays.An organization that wants to go beyond the logic of capital ortries to obey its own logic, not one imposed by its economic andsocial condition, doesn’t need to confine itself to class defini-tions. This break with old definitions shouldn’t be confused withthe marketing eagerness of parties and candidates that converttheir structures into catch-alls and admit everyone through theirwide ideological doors.

Another aspect of the subject that I can only mention hererefers to the very character of classes, as an abstraction. In thereal world people struggle, real men and women, not “the classes”.This is not meant to imply that “class struggle” is a mere unrealfantasy, but situates it in the theoretical locale, the theoreticalniche, appropriate to it.

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At this point, I can only cherish the hope that those whodogmatically persist in the construction of “class organizations”won’t hold up the enormous organizational effort that we needto carry out in so-called civil society.

Ah! Power

I dream of an intellectual who destroys proofs and universals,who discovers and reveals, within present day limitations andinertia, weaknesses, openings, lines of force; one that is alwayschanging location. He doesn’t know precisely where he will be orwhat he will be thinking tomorrow because he is completely ab-sorbed in the present. (Michel Foucault)

Those that to be heard must die, the always forgotten in revolu-tionary work and political parties, those absent in history, thosealways present in misery, the small, the deaf, the eternal infants,those without voice or face, the receivers of disdain, the incapaci-tated, the abandoned, the uncounted dead, the inciters of tender-ness, the professionals of hope, those of worthy countenance de-nied, those with pure anger, those of pure fire, those for whomenough is enough, those of the early morning, those that say:everything for everyone, nothing for us (para todos todo, paranosotros nada).

Those with the word that walks, us, we want no duty, no glory, nofame. We simply want to be prologue to the new world. A newworld with a new way of doing politics, a new type of politics bypeople in government, by men and women that command by obey-ing (que manden obedeciendo). (Talk by subcomandanteMarcos, La realidad, May 17th, 1994)

In these notes I have tried to make clear the way in which theZapatistas have made real that new form of doing politics,thereby dissolving the question of power. It seems pointless tome to play with words and say, if power is always the power todo what you want to do, the Zapatistas have been exercisingtheir power. Or that, inverting the discourse, the people are ex-ercising their proper power, and we will thus talk of “empower-ing”, as if power were some “thing” that some have and othersdon’t and that needs to be redistributed. We need different words

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for talking about what isn’t simply the opposite of power (thatwhich resists it), but also something radically different. It isn’tits reflection or its opposite. It is in another place.

With French pedantry, Foucault (1970, 1981, 1992, 2002)had suggested something of this kind. He brilliantly describedthe characteristics of the existing system of knowledge/power,its role in the construction of modern society and its regime ofpower, and the form of political uprising taken today by therebellion of “subjugated knowledge”. He ably dispelled whatappeared an unacceptable contradiction in his proposal: main-taining at the same time that power has died and that power iseverywhere. According to Foucault, the radical rejection of thepower of the powerful (which is more and more fragile and in-competent, useful only for destruction), doesn’t presume pow-erlessness. Nor does it look for the construction of an alterna-tive or different power, which would only reproduce the evilthat had been rejected. It heralds new sociological and politicalinventions that express themselves in regenerated social rela-tionships which aren’t determined or conditioned by power.

Foucault said, on the one hand, that the question is not tomodify the conscience of the people or what they have in theirheads, as reformists and revolutionaries along the entire politi-cal spectrum try to do. It is about changing the political, eco-nomic and institutional regime that produces “truth”, or moreclearly, the statements in accordance with which we govern our-selves and others. On the other hand, he also maintained thatwhat was needed was a simultaneous upheaval of ideologiesand institutions, in order to formulate an historical knowledgeof struggle to be expressed in the autonomization of culturalnuclei interconnected in a reticular form. Whew! What a tonguetwister!

But the subject is interesting. It offers a path that allows usto build bridges between conventional political thought, whichnow operates as a lens for many people, and the radical politicalinnovations that we are witnessing. Foucault said that while hu-manists propose modifying ideologies without changing institu-tions, the reformists want to modify the institutions withoutmodifying the ideological system. We have examples from thepast and present on all sides: change everything in order to changenothing. What is necessary is to act simultaneously on both theideological and the institutional planes. It’s pointless to reform

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from head to tail the institutions if their ideological orientationis maintained. And nothing is served in changing the ideologiesof those that head these institutions if the institutions them-selves are retained intact.

It’s about co-motion, not development, or conscientization(as Freire thought), or unleashing the process of change, aidingthe awakening, reforming the apparatuses of the state, combat-ing corruption, inefficiency or counter-productivity in the insti-tutions… Co-motion is a nice word. It assumes moving with theother, like in a dance, and doing it with everything, with heart,stomach and the entire being, not only the head. And, commo-tion works through contagion.

At the ideological level, what is needed is the daring to re-nounce general, globalist discourses and their theories in orderto reinvent speech, the language, the categories, the systems thatproduce the statements with which we govern ourselves… Weneed to abandon scientism and realize that humanism is moreand more openly totalitarian, a provocateur that prostitutes think-ing and whose paradigm is the professionalized and institution-alized technocrat.

At the institutional level, instead of occupying ourselves withreforming or struggling against institutions or taking them intoour hands, we need to dissolve them, that is, eliminate the “ne-cessity” of their existence, which comes from the artificial cre-ation of scarcity, professional specialization and the reductionof human needs and their satisfaction to institutional “problems”resolvable through the application of appropriate processes, pro-cedures and technologies. This criticism includes the de-mythification of formal democracy as we progress in the organi-zation of alternative forms of “government” and a structuringof society that takes the form of a web and which is postulatedas a substitute to the growing “organic integration” which inevi-tably is equivalent to the institutional integration of power.

We are not concerned here with decentralization, as certain“autonomisms” suggest: that is simply a transfer of the center tothe periphery, consistent with certain norms and geared towardefficiency in terms of Anglo-Saxon colonial discourse that pro-duced theories and practices of “popular participation”, “com-munity development” and “autonomous” regions or communi-ties. We are not concerned here about creating, for the indigenouspeoples “multiethnic autonomous regions” that are only decen-

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tralized forms of the vertical apparatus of the state. Rather weare concerned with reconfiguring the center… dissolving it, sup-porting it in multiple cultural nuclei which are autonomous cen-ters for the production of “truth” and are interconnected as aweb, thus eliminating the need for a common center. We speakhere of the step from decentralization to decentralism, in a pat-tern whose pale, mechanical image can be found today in theoperation on a global scale of the postal system, the telephone,or internet…

The breaking down of the apparatuses of state defined powerconsists above all in dissolving the professionalization and insti-tutionalization of the needs and capacities of people. It is notabout destroying those apparatuses and even less of putting themin the hands of a “collective” or “popular” administration, sinceit’s those very apparatuses which contain alien and alienated pat-terns, the virus of power. It’s about articulating other ways ofthinking and doing that would replace those apparatuses, ren-dering them unnecessary. Instead of institutions that are moreand more openly counterproductive (schools producing igno-rance, health systems sickening, transportation systems paralyz-ing…), each one of which is a mechanism of domination, op-pression and discrimination, it is about putting into operationother techniques and technologies under the effective controlof the people, through which they can effectively express theiractivities, their capacities, their creativity.

The modernization of political machinery leaves it increas-ingly powerless, since its fragmented and feudal character makeits effective coordination impossible when faced with the webof communicating vessels that define reality. The unavoidablerigidity that defines the operative terminals of all public appara-tuses (trapped in their norms, their square windows) make themineffective before the changing vitality of the real world. Fromtop to bottom, in these conditions, the driving forces fall intothe social void; from the bottom up, into the institutional void.

What’s needed, what the Zapatistas have been continuallydoing, could be expressed in the following terms:

�Localize criticism: It is not obtuse, primitive or naïve empiri-cism nor equivocal eclecticism, nor opportunism or perme-ability to any theoretical enterprise. It isn’t a kind of asceti-cism. It is about an autonomous form of production that

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doesn’t need a common set of norms to affirm its own va-lidity.

�Strengthening and deepening the insurrection of subjugatedknowledge:�Reclaiming the historical content buried or masked withinfunctional incohe-rencies and formal systematizations.�Revaluing knowledge disqualified because it had beenconsidered useless, insufficiently elaborated, naïve or hi-erarchically inferior to scientific knowledge. Popular wis-dom is not common knowledge, because it doesn’t implyunanimity. The knowledge we talk about is more specific,local, regional, differentiated…

�Juxtaposing and combining learned knowledge with local memory toform an historical knowledge of struggle. This requires demolish-ing the tyranny of globalizing discourse with its hierarchyand the privileges it derives from the scientific classificationof knowledge, which has intrinsic effects of power.

�Abandoning the perspective of the “society as a whole” as a conditionfor moving forward. This is to dream with last night´s, said Fou-cault. The “society as a whole” is the result of innumerablefactors and impulses that no one can control.

�Simultaneously rejecting the hypothesis of innate egoism (key to theillusion of perfect competition) and innate altruism (key to the illu-sion of perfect cooperation). Cooperation and reciprocity are so-cial relationships that should be invented and reinventedcontinually.

“What resists supports”, said an old Mexican politician when heopened Congress to the opposition in order to legitimize the PRI.“Where there is power there is resistance”, said Foucault. Theimportant thing is the strategic codification of points of resis-tance, so that they effectively propitiate the autonomization ofthe cultural nuclei that are connected in the form of a web.

All webs are made of holes. Their strength and capacity forretention depend on the strategic arrangement of the holes. Thisarrangement should be conceived as an opening without definedlimits, without a general plan, without any vision of the “societyas a whole”… Addressing the inequalities that are unavoidablyproduced given the heterogeneity of the knots of an open webshouldn’t take place under the ridiculous assumption of the al-truistic and unilateral character of the “strong” knots toward

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the “weak”, but rather by giving new meaning to the interchangesthat take place within the complex interaction of social rela-tionships.

I am aware of the rigidity and confusion of these paragraphsin which I try to escape from the straitjacket of the dominantnotions of power and I use Foucault’s jargon as a set of contourlines. This is not something that can be done lightly, in the frameof notes like these. Yet here it is. (See Esteva 1994, 1998, 1999,2003; Holloway, 1998, 2002).

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Some Bibliographical Clues

(Including References)

Aguirre R., C.A., Echeverría, B., Montemayor C. y Wallerstein,I. 2002. Chiapas en perspectiva histórica. Barcelona: El ViejoTopo.

Araitz, N. 1997. Tierno veneno. De algunos encuentros en las montañasindígenas de Chiapas y Guerrero. Barcelona: Ed. Virús.

Aubry, A. 1994. ¿Qué es la sociedad civil? San Cristóbal de LasCasas: INAREMAC.

—. 2003. “Autonomy in the San Andrés Accords: Expressionand Fulfillment of a New Federal Pact”, in: J. Rus,R.A.Hernández and S. Mattiace, Mayan Lives, Mayan Uto-pias. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

Avilés, J. 2001. Nosotros estamos muertos. México: Océano.Autonomedia. 1994. ¡Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican

Revolution. New York: Autonomedia.Barrón P., D. (Ed.). 2001. La guerra por la palabra: A siete años de

la lucha zapatista. México: Rizoma.Barry, T. 1995. Zapata’s Revenge: Free Trade and the Farm Crisis in

Mexico. Boston: South End Press.Camú Ursúa, G. y D. Tótoro Taulis. 1994. EZLN: El ejército que

salió de la selva. México: Planeta.Centro de Análisis Político e Investigaciones Sociales y

Económicas (Capise). 2003. La ocupación militar en Chiapas:El dilema del prisionero. San Cristóbal de Las Casas: Capise.

Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas(CDHFBC). 1996. Ni paz ni justicia. Segundo informe general yamplio acerca de la guerra civil que sufren los choles en la zona nortede Chiapas, diciembre de 1994 a octubre de 1996. San Cristóbalde Las Casas: CDHFBC.

—. 1998. La legalidad de la injusticia. San Cristóbal de Las Casas:CDHFBC.

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—. 1998. Acteal, entre el duelo y la lucha. San Cristóbal de LasCasas: CDHFBC.

Centro de Información y Análisis de Chiapas (CIACH). 1998.Relatos del viejo Antonio. México: CIACH.

Chiapaslink. 2000. The Zapatistas: A Rough Guide. Londres:Calverts Press.

Chomski, N. et al. 1995. Chiapas Insurgente: Cinco ensayos sobre larealidad mexicana. Navarra: Txalaparta Editorial.

Collier, G. 1999. Land & the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas (Rev.Edition). Oakland: Food First Books.

Comisión Nacional de Intermediación. Archivo histórico: enero1994-julio 1998. 2002. México: Serapaz.

Condearena, L. 1997. Chiapas: el despertar de la esperanza. Donosita:Ed. Gakoa.

Coordinadora de Organismos no Gubernamen-tales por la Paz(Conpaz). 1996. Militarización y violencia en Chiapas. México:Conpaz.

De Vos, Jan. 1996. Lacandonia, al filo del agua. México: Ciesas.Durán, M. (Comp.). 1994. Yo Marcos. México: Ediciones del

milenio.Durán, M. y Marcos. 1999. El tejido del pasamon-tañas. Barcelona:

Ed. Virús.Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). 1994. Viaje

al centro de la selva. Memorial zapatista enero-agosto 1994.México: Argos.

—. 1994 y 1995. La palabra de los armados de verdad y fuego. México:Fuenteovejuna.

—. 1994. Documentos y comunicados 1, 1 de enero/8 de agosto de 1994.México: Era.

—. 1995. Documentos y comunicados 2, 15 de agosto de 1994/29 deseptiembre de 1995. México: Era.

—. 1995. Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiqués ofSubcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Lib-eration. New York: Monthly Review Press.

—. 1996. Crónicas intergalácticas EZLN. Primer Encuentro Intercon-tinental por la Humanidad y contra el Neoliberalismo. México:Planeta Tierra.

—. 1997. Documentos y comunicados 3, 2 de octubre de 1995/24 deenero de 1997. México: Era.

—. 1997. Chiapas: del dolor a la esperanza. Madrid: Libros de laCatarata.

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—. 2001. Comunicados del EZLN–2000. San Cristóbal de LasCasas: Ediciones Pirata.

—. 2001. La marcha del color de la tierra. Comunicados, cartas y mensajesdel EZLN del 2 de diciembre de 2000 al 2 de abril de 2001.México: Rizoma.

Elorriaga, J. Ecos de Cerrohueco. El presunto juicio de un zapatista.México: FZLN.

Esteva, G. 1992. “Development”, in: W. Sachs (Ed.), The Devel-opment Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London:Zed Books.

—. 1994. Crónica del fin de una era: El secreto del EZLN. México:Posada.

——. 1998. “Autonomía y democracia radical: el tránsito de latolerancia a la hospitalidad”, in: M.Bartolomé y A. Barrabas(Eds.), Autonomías étnicas y estados nacionales. México:CONACULTA/INAH.

—. 1999. “The Zapatistas and People’s Power”. Capital & Class68 (Summer).

—. 2000. “The Revolution of the New Commons”, in: C. Cookand J. Lindau (Eds.), Aboriginal Rights and Self-Government.Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

—. 2001. “Introducción”, in: CEDI, Experiencias organizativas dela sociedad civil en Oaxaca. Oaxaca:CEDI.

—. 2002. “Más allá de la igualdad y la representación: lademocracia radical”, in: A. Hémond and D.Recondo (Eds.),Dilemas de la democracia en México. México: IFE/CEMCA.

—. 2003. “Meaning and Scope of the Struggle for Autonomy”,in: J. Rus, R.A. Hernández and S. Mattiace, Mayan Lives,Mayan Utopias. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publish-ers.

—. 2003. “A flower in the hands of the people”. New Internation-alist. 360, September.

Esteva, G. and M. Prakash. 1998. Grassroots Postmodernism: Re-making the Soil of Cultures. London: Zed Books.

Foucault, M. 1970. La arqueología del saber. México: Siglo XXI.—. 1980. Power/Knowledge (Ed. by Colin Gordon). New York:

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Some Zapatista Web Pages

¡Ya Basta! Página oficial del Ejército Zapatista de LiberaciónNacional (EZLN).http://www.ezln.org/FZLN Página oficial del Frente Zapatista de LiberaciónNacional.http://www.fzln.org.mx/Rebeldía La revista Rebeldía publicada por el FZLN on line.http://www.revistarebeldia.org/main.htmlEnlace civil.http://www.enlacecivil.org.mx/index.htmColectivo de Solidaridad de la Rebelión Zapatista. DesdeBarcelona.http://pangea.org/ellokal/chiapas/home/mexp.htmAcción Zapatista.http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/nave/Zapatista Net of Autonomy and Liberation.www.actlab.utexas.edu/~zapatistas/Indymedia Chiapas.http://chiapas.mediosindependientes.org/Zapatista Index.http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/zapatista.htmlIntroduction to México and the Zapatistas. http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/begindx/EZLN Chiapas Battalion.www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/5225/bzalx/plalxbz.htmlChiapas Media Project.http://www.chiapasmediaproject.org/