A fair cop, but there are damn few places in the South where patriarchy has been beat, you know, Doug.
> Having just read Judith Adler Hellman's fascinating Socialist
> Register piece <http://www.yorku.ca/socreg/hellman.txt>,
(and Harry Cleaver's critiques?)
> I'm not sure
> that "communal autonomy" is an unproblematic thing. The communities
> themselves are deeply divided by ethnicity, religion, and political
> preference.
Operationally, though, it's mainly by geography. The key unit of micro-political analysis there, the autonomous municipality, is important. But of course there's Zapatismo which links all the three dozen autonomous municipalities and language groups into what is often a quite coherent, unified struggle discourse and practice.
> 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, and autonomous
> administration will only reinforce the divisions and the dominance of the
> powerful over the weak, of rich over poor, of men over women."
Not necessarily true. "Rooted inside communities" ignores the way the ranchers, PRIistas and other big cigars literally buy paramilitary groups. I saw this over and over in transitional South Africa, a decade ago. The Inkatha Freedom Party in Alexandra township, for instance, was a paramilitary supported by the last-kick apartheid mischief-makers, and generated more than 100 killings on two separate nights in 1991 and 1992, but since 1994 there's been no overt violence from the Inkatha areas of Alex.
> She quotes another:
> "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.
I.e., the Zaps stealing electricity. Hellman's wrong here too. There's no necessary contradiction between demands for autonomy and for redistribution. The SA slogan was "a strong but slim state"--strong enough to redistribute and provide sufficient subsidies for all basic needs to be met, slim enough to leave space for community and worker control. The (truncated) Zapatista economics table at San Andres, ably assisted by UNAM economists like Carlos Salas (and local San Cristobal economist Gustavo Castro), made these points. Doug, a few years ago I sent you their mild-mannered Keynesian-sounding national economic recovery proposals (I've lost them). Look back and tell me that these proposals--no matter how wishywashy they might appear to us super-rads--were somehow devoid of a redistributive line...