>"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. It's
>little wonder that this proposal on autonomy is the only part of the
>San Andrés
>agreement that the Mexican state was willing to sign on to. It
>costs the state
>nothing if the indigenous people close in on themselves."
Who's gonna implement "a serious redistributive policy"? You won't get "a serious redistributive policy" just because a ragtag "army" -- an army in the name only -- raises such a demand from the political margins. For "a serious redistributive policy" to become a reality, the EZLN (or some other leftist forces) have to take _state power_, but they _are not now & have never been_ in a position to even bid for it. Too small, too weak, too few allies in Mexico. The Zaps have mainly functioned as a lightly armed pressure group (armed basically for self-defence only), not as a revolutionary armed force to make a frontal assault upon the Mexican state or even carve out a large chunk of territory for itself a la FARC -- hence the Zaps' popularity among the Western leftists & even liberals.
Autonomy turned out to be a very poor idea in Yugoslavia, so probably there shouldn't be too much of it under socialism, but, _under capitalism_, for leftist forces to gain a zone of autonomy for themselves tend to be a good thing: in Columbia; in Kerala, India; in Emilia-Romagna, Italy; etc.
At 8:23 AM +0000 1/31/01, Patrick Bond wrote:
> > Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001 15:50:27 -0500
>> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>> You're right, though you don't have to speak any language to notice
>> when women are not talking in the presence of men.
>
>A fair cop, but there are damn few places in the South where
>patriarchy has been beat, you know, Doug.
There are two ways to erode the material base of rural patriarchy & usher in modern sexism & with it a new terrain of women's struggles: let capital erode it by destroying rural agriculture altogether or else the revolutionaries get rid of it on their own. Either way, it will take primitive accumulation, capitalist or socialist; in the capitalist case, you'll get a huge stream of landless migrants, who will move to cities in Mexico or further to the North (which has already been happening to some extent); in the socialist case, you'll probably get the kind of problem that all socialist primitive accumulations experienced. Peasants get beaten in both cases. Perhaps there is a third way that doesn't involve coercion, but no one in world history has even tried it, even if there is one.
Yoshie