>>A bunch of coy, deceptive, educated, urban cosmopolites are
>>"really" running things in Chiapas. Now I get it: Marcos et. al.
>>are really Elders of Zion!
>
>I assume this is a joke.
Oh god my email-sarcasm's that pathetic? "Cosmopolite" etc.: old code words, y'know, for Jew. And I guess I was reaching for resonance with the recent Postone anti-semitism thread. The phenomenon of collapsing complex processes into one visible cause that's "really" behind things. There seemed a whisper of that logic in your Zap description, though with inverted valence for the Cosmopolites.
>You're right, though you don't have to speak any language to notice
>when women are not talking in the presence of men.
No, you don't. But as Patrick pointed out, gender inequality is hardly unique to Mayan communities. At any rate the observation just seemed like odd evidence for the conclusion that "the Zaps have almost no connection to actual village life as it's lived on the ground."
>Having just read Judith Adler Hellman's fascinating Socialist
>Register piece <http://www.yorku.ca/socreg/hellman.txt>, I'm not
>sure that "communal autonomy" is an unproblematic thing.
Finally was able to look at it. I certainly agree with her main point: it's important to acquaint oneself with a struggle's local context rather than holding naive simplifications from afar. My caveat is that while deftly dislodging the simplifications of romantic cyber-lefties, she makes a few modernist simplifications herself.
Also, I agree "communal autonomy is not an unproblematic thing." (Could it ever be otherwise? especially when to be subaltern is precisely to have no unproblematic options?) But here on nuanced lbo-list there don't seem to be any Zap cyber-groupies, so the issue wasn't whether autonomy was unproblematic but whether events in Chiapas were indicative of any broader openings. As a movement you seemed dubious that it counted for much, since it "wouldn't have gotten started without the leaders," and wasn't a "revolutionary movement emerging authentically from traditional rural social structures."
Then you added:
>The communities themselves are deeply divided by ethnicity,
>religion, and political preference. Hellman quotes an anonymous
>source:
>
>"This concept of autonomy is illusory because it suggests that
>caciquismo, the divisive forces of class, religion, political affiliation,
>and all the corrupt and violent people are external to indigenous communities
>and can be shut out once the communities gain autonomous control over their
>affairs. But these forces don't lie outside of indigenous communities. They
>are already deeply rooted inside these communities,
But who exactly thinks "autonomy" suggests that these things are external to and can be shut out of indigenous communities? The indigenous? the Zap-obsessed lefties on the Internet? If the latter, then may her article disseminate widely and complicate their romantic view. But the fact of community-transforming relations between indigenas communities and the larger world sometimes seemed like hard-to-assimilate news to Hellman too. As in, if the communities are "no longer traditional" then what's left are mere "recreated" identities that are really based on outside political, religious, economic forces.
The problem (and I guess I didn't communicate this too well last time) is this either/or thinking: tradition/self-enclosed communities or modern/invented/externally derived ones. The problem with this dualism is not some dry academic issue.
>"What I think is needed is not autonomy but a serious redistributive
>policy. Autonomy would only mean that these impoverished people would be even
> more enclosed in their misery.
>
>What we should be demanding is that the poorest,
>disadvantaged regions receive a greater proportion of the national wealth.
Serious redistribution would be nice. The question is whether it's even imaginable via the conventional organizational means, or whether holding to that possibility is about as likely as seeing you devote your energies to making the Democrats a socialist party.
Of course political projects, including autonomy aspirations, can adapt to shifting lines of conflict and potential. But with all of Hellman's "enclosed in their misery" testimonials (some with whiffs of patronization), you'd think the Zap goal was implosion rather than greater control over terms of involvement in a taken for granted larger world. These invocations of communities "closing in on themselves" are especially ironic given that the demand in fact reflects and exploits a political field that expands beyond the one available to indigenous peoples within conventional campesino or proletariano organizations.
And by "extended political field" I'm not just referring to coy Zapatista PR campaigns. In fact Zap panache seems to be acting as an analytical hindrance here, by deflecting attention from aspects that this indigenous movement shares with many other ones (including next door in Oaxaca, for instance).
Hellman doesn't do much with the fact that the internal differentiations she uncovers in Mayan communities (livelihood, party, religion) coincide with a growing, not diminishing, indigenous consciousness. This is part of a widespread phenomenon in southern Mexico and elsewhere. (Maybe H. missed this because soliciting perspectives from local indigenas didn't appear to be much of a priority for her.)
Other internal differentiations, important ones, could be added to the ones she cites. Many Southern Mexican indigenas reside outside of their home region for long periods of time: in the shanty-towns of Mexican cities or border towns, many of them employed in the "informal" sector (= that under-analyzed category that accounts for an enormous amount of activity in the third-world); others are commercial agricultural workers in Northern Mexico, or agribusiness or domestic workers in California, etc. The various positions, along with the more classically "peasant" one, are frequently held by members of the same family or by the same person at different times. And none of these modes-of-production ("peasant" "proletarian" "semi"-peasant/prole, etc.) is on the verge of swallowing up the others as a dominant one.
But while these differentiations are taking place on one level, you've got new fusions taking place the identity level. In one sense it's what often happens when people from different communities (villages, ethnic groups, etc.) are thrown together (in shanty towns, work groups, neighborhoods) and become more conscious of their commonalities (a shared "culture" and frame of reference). In this case the commonalities are perceived vis a vis mestizos, anglos, Mexican-Americans, and the heightened consciousness is of course helped along by common discrimination against them by these other groups.
It seems important to take account of the fact that people living in lands far from their birth (as Doug put it earlier today) frequently do not lose their sense of roots. That rather than becoming deterritorialized they become involved in multiple territorializations, social networks and sub-networks, that sustain and can even strengthen attachments to a "home" locality.
Hence the much noted phenomenon of trans-local spaces like "Oaxacalifornia"; a mental and material loop with self-help organizations in California, Chicago, etc., organized around support for both fellow-migrants and for peso-starved communities back home. (For example, the Frente Oaxaquena Binacional, which evolved out of an earlier organization linking Mixtecs and Zapotecs self-help groups, but now involving other indigenous Oaxacan groups.)
Social dynamics like this might help explain why autonomy movements like the Zaps' don't emerge "authentically from traditional rural social structures." If the movement doesn't reduce to a classical peasant struggle for agrarian reform, that's because they're not all classical peasants. If the "ethnic" (rather than "peasant") form of the struggle reveals not just material but also symbolic priorities, this is also true. Indigenous movements that go so far as to demand autonomy tend to perceive their land not just as a means of material production but as a vital (and vitally endangered) space for reproduction of a collective identity as well.
But this "symbolic" demand is hardly unconnected to their material realities. As mentioned above, the struggle for "symbolic" recognition often converts into material empowerment where exclusively peasant and/or worker based politics were dead-ends. "Indigenous" issues, as opposed to citizen-based agrarian or proletarian ones, can link members with different material occupations, as well as link up with transnational politics of human (increasingly including "collective") rights, eco-politics and so forth, in ways that change the field and terms of engagement. (Though they may not make headlines like the mask-clad Zaps, there are loads of examples here of effective linkages.)
How far these ethnic based struggles and their sub-/trans-national alliances can go is an open question. But in addition to the well rehearsed dangers of playing the ethnic card, there are some more promising aspects involved as well. As struggles that revolve around both material and symbolic value (indigenous groups being marked off within national societies by their unassimilable social or cultural distinctness), it's a particular kind of "assertion of dignity" or however Peter V-H put it in his earlier post.
It goes back to what I mentioned last week about the Zaps being one example of recent proliferations of assertions of difference, assertions simultaneously based on a more general presumption of species-being. If there's some common denominator between these kinds of "assertions of dignity" and Doug's shortlist of promising global politics,
>"Seattle," Porto Alegre, the World Bank bond boycott, student-worker
>solidarity (through the anti-sweatshop movement), the anti-MAI
>mobilization, independent union organizing, cross-border labor
>solidarity, immigration amnesty movements
it's that all of these movements oppose global cap's conditions based on a rights to the power of production, where "production" is rather broadly conceived. Production of means of subsistence but also production of social being and human personhood. With this wider understanding, with a struggle for both the definition and control of human power of production, there's more room for collaboration between groups experiencing and fighting different parts of the capitalist elephant. (More possibility, even, that some of its contraditions could be perceived by a fraction of the materially comfortable but otherwise alienated middle class. )
It's quite a stretch to hope that this momentum can be forged into a coherent enough understanding of global cap or a united enough political vision to give the present hegemony a serious challenge (via "states," or trans-national movements, or feedback loops between the two). I certainly don't mean to lobby here for excessive optimism. Just trying to grapple with the elephant, its strengths and weaknesses, from one vantage point.
Maureen