>Patrick Bond wrote:
>
>> (I did a couple of weeks
>>in Chiapas on one of those Global Exchange tours in 1998, and found
>>it an exceptionally enlightening experience, with a dual-power vibe
>>like mid-1980s SA townships, where collectivity,
>>identity/consciousness, and concrete social struggle against military
>>*and economic* oppression were synthesised wonderfully.)
>
>I wonder. I've recounted what Zeynep Toufeckcioglu, a Turkish
>marxist-feminist, told me after a long visit to Chiapas: the Zaps
>have almost no connection to actual village life as it's lived on
>the ground, where everyone works from dawn til dusk, and women don't
>speak until spoken to.
>
>But let's talk about the Zaps. They're internationalists who've used
>the Internet, images, and clever and literate communiques to make
>their points. The leaders are all educated urban cosmopolites. They
>coyly pretend to take direction from below, but no one would have
>ever paid any attention to them - nor would the movement ever have
>gotten started - had it not been for those leaders. So this is not a
>revolutionary movement emerging authentically from traditional rural
>social structures.
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've heard many impressions at odds with your Turkish friend's, and it raises the question: under what circumstances could one take a visit to Chiapas and obtain an accurate idea of the relation between the Zaps and local communities? I don't know. My guess is it would be pretty hard - especially if one doesn't happen to speak Tzotzil or Tzeltal (which presumably your Turkish acquaintance does not).
Yet your friend's impression, combined with your a priori distrust of savvy cosmopolitans mixing with locals, has you quickly dismiss what the non-indigenous Zap members have consistently said. That they came to the region more as vanguardists wanting to organize a guerilla army to overthrow the state. But when they were exposed to the local scene and actually asked what the people themselves wanted, they soon discovered that seizing state power wasn't it. Local communities thought that would be pointless because the state was bound to remain an oppressive institution. What they wanted was communal autonomy, an army to protect their own local communities, the use of their local, consensus based political decision-making processes rather than a party structure, etc.
And then, yes, to this the "cosmopolites" certainly brought resources that hadn't been at the local communities' disposal: access to international communications, to media and intellectual and networks, etc. But that's the point: the local groups are oppressed! Stripped, precisely, of access to those kinds of resources and money.
So there is something weirdly circular about pulling inauthenticity out of the fact that the local communities wouldn't have just risen up "on their own." Had they done so they would have been instantly slaughtered. (And, you know, Highland Mayan communities, who've known a hell of a lot of slaughter, do in fact have a history of rising up whenever they think they have a chance in hell of winning.) By this way of stacking things, Mayans can only be authentic by living up to some first-world notion of self-enclosed, static tradition (and in so doing becoming slaughtered martyrs). Whereas if they do enter into networks and alliances that increase their effectiveness in being who they want to be, by definition they are inauthentic.
Some cultures just have all the luck. I mean you are pretty confident Doug that you can ingest a McDonald's french fry and lose neither your politics nor your soul. Because you recognize that neither politics nor contamination work quite so simply. But if local Mayans have truck with cosmopolitans, they are fatally contaminated with inauthenticity? their media savvy allies are prima facie their real leaders? Like I said, some of us french fry munching, Powerbook tapping cosmopolitans have all the uncontaminated luck.
No one's denying that the Zapatistas have been shaped by the neoliberal present. History's always forged out the openings and limits of particular moments. In the years leading up to the uprising, particular neoliberal econ policies, particular struggles of grassroots movements, particular alliance forgings, all of it together shaped the form of the uprising.
And on the macro level, too, Chiapas seems emblematic of our Neoliberal present. As states everywhere have become increasingly unmoored from the pretense that their role is to protect the interests of all its "citizens," they've increasingly reoriented both fiscal priorities and rhetoric. The state's legitimacy has come to rest ever more on its role as effective mediator of global economic processes (where everyone who plays their cards right can "profit," and too bad for everyone else), and this shift has encouraged lots of minorities and disprivileged groups around the globe to assert their difference, and their "rights" to their difference, on a simultaneously sub- and trans-national level.
It's an interesting resistance dynamic. Based on one hand on assertions of difference. And based, on another level, on a universal, "human" right to that difference - where this more encompassing recognition of sameness grounds horizontal alliances between different groups, each asserting their uniqueness.
So you get networks - at their broadest, ones like People's Global Action (www.agp.org) with member groups all over the world; groups that have had a very strong, if under-reported, role in the current anti-cap protests movements. And within them you get more specific alliances: between 4th world groups, between indigenous women's groups, between indigenous groups and first world environmentalists, or indigenous groups and erstwhile vanguardists, etc.
Certainly most of these alliances involve contact with the internet and airplanes and at least a few Powerbook-tapping cosmopolitans. How exactly does this a priori render the groups, or the local priorities the groups bring to these alliances, or the alliances themselves, inauthentic?
Of course one shouldn't lose sight of the potential pitfalls of these movements. Including the double, jagged, edge of the global discourses they draw upon and contribute to. The dangers are real. Every conjuncture has risks and hard choices. But to summarily dismiss these people's-movements as inauthentic not only prevents you from recognizing one of the more promising "openings" of the moment, it's also probably one more instance of first-worlders writing the role of oppressed groups out of history.
Maureen