>What's new in the Zapatistas? I think probably most importantly the
>idea of non-homogenous unity - instead of struggling the seize the
>state and unify people as abstract atoms of that state ('citizens' or
>whatever), rather struggling against the state and in favour of
>'the free development of each' ...
I sez:
I know little to nothing about the Zapatistas, so perhaps my following remarks are ill-founded, but I'll pose them anyway. While the "movement" certainly isn't about taking state power, it seems like a stretch to say that it is about the "free development of each." That just seems like tried-and-true anarcho-communist romanticization of indigenous peasants who want land and peace, who want material security and the preservation of their culture. Yes, semi-peripheral and peripheral Marxists from Lenin forward have archly used the villagers' discontent in times of political crisis for their own aims (i.e. taking state power and developing the forces of production) but that does not mean that contemporary "autonomists" do not "use" the villagers in their own more benign fashion, i.e. by entertaining fantasies about the hidden meaning of indigenous peasant struggle. Just because First World squatters and Fourth World semi-subsistence peoples nominally have something in common -- i.e. at a high level of abstraction they both resist the coercive state and incorporation into capitalist labor markets -- does not mean they have much else in common. IMHO, the "autonomists" glorify the Zapatistas and hence distort them beyond recognition b/c they are secretly disgusted by the prevailing apathy, consumerism, and cynicism of the First World working class, but they can't come right out and say it (or they obscure it behind concepts like the racism of the white working class) b/c this would contradict their whole notion that every little tiny "subversive" gesture (shoplifting, sick-ins, jaywalking, grafitti, etc.) is imbued with revolutionary consciousness. The reality is that the inner life of a First World autonomist is a lot more like the inner life of a First World proletarian than that of a Fourth World indigenous peasant, b/c the first two groups are both products of this bizarre post-modern capitalist society which is at one and the same time full of semi-fascist authoritarianism and libertine excess.
John Gulick