Absolutely. I've never understood the innovations of autonomism, even if in my SA circuits good comrades like Peter and Franco Barchiesi give us lots of inspiring tales. I always just thought it was an interesting way to link a lot of resistance processes. But in doing so, even the very best of the autonomist writers (here I also mean those who write clearly and "meaningfully," unlike Negri)--Cleaver, Caffentzis, Federici--tend to bend the stick way way over towards a class-strugglist analysis of crisis formation. (I personally come from the school that says regardless of the stage of class struggle, intrinsic crisis tendencies within the accumulation cycle--rising K/L ratios, overproduction, disproportionalities, etc-- always bubble up, and those engaged in any kind of anti-capitalist activism should be attuned to such dynamics at least as much as they are to the capital/labour relation.)
> ...
> Compare the Cuban Revolution with the Zapatista strategy. _Not
> because of any fault on the part of the latter, but because of the
> drastic change in the balance of the forces_, the latter has yet to
> achieve one hundredth of what the former has.
True, but here you have to admit, Yoshie, that the extraordinary conjuncture of class struggle, indigenous-movement consciousness, political strategy in neo-feudal Mexico, and international solidarity (internet or no), allows Zapatismo to truly bridge the gaps between "political" and "economic" liberation that, for example in Southern Africa, we're still not able to articulate at the level they have in Mexico. Even if the material conditions (and the stage of struggle) in Chiapas are not 1/100th as far along as in Cuba, or for that matter, as in South Africa's national liberation, we cannot but admire the analysis, the rhetorical formulations, the imagery, the concrete strategies and tactics, and the modes by which the Zaps think/act globally/locally.
> Whither the Zapatistas (and the Zapatistas are us) in the era of the
> triumphant Progress of the Empire?
The other day, spatting with Doug the Cynic, I called them--those struggling in Chiapas, and those others who call themselves Zapatistas, especially those from all over the world who just convened in Porto Alegre--the vanguard, without shame. They fight, I think, not only against Empire and State. Crucially, they fight not to "take" Empire and State. (Indeed, international power relations don't allow the "taking" of states and the winning of social progress in the Third World, these days.) I think they're (we're) fighting to first and foremost, dissolve the power of neoliberalism and all other oppressions. (One day soon that will mean having to take a lot more states, of course, but meantime what the Zapatistas remind us of is that persistent, uncompromising *opposition* is the appropriate formula, and especially so when it comes to nixing--not fixing--the embryonic global state...)
(I'm just getting a review together of new books by Kagarlitsky, Brecher et al and a few others, which raise these issues. What other literature, aside from Empire, by now a dead horse, are people reading about global analysis and resistance? I'm running two courses on the topic and trying to quickly expand my reading lists...)