[lbo-talk] The Zapatistas triggered it all

Julio Huato juliohuato at gmail.com
Wed Jan 4 06:49:54 PST 2012


Wojtek wrote:


> Can you summarize his argument for those who do not read Spanish?

For those who don't read Spanish... and refuse to use Google Translate, sure:

According to Hermann Bellinghausen (La Jornada), these are theses argued by sociologists, Pablo González Casanova (Mexico) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Portugal) at an international seminar held in San Cristobal de (Bartolome de) Las Casas (Chiapas, Mexico). As they resonate in my head, the salient points are two:

(1) The EZLN kept the flame alive in the face of what appeared to be a juggernaut, and therein lies the (or one of the) merit(s) of their movement. People should remember that the Zapatistas staged their uprising when the "neoliberal" tide was in the up, Mexico had been forced by its debt crisis to plug its economy to that of the U.S.

By the way, before that, in February 1992, in Venezuela, Hugo Chávez made a coup attempt against the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, who had implemented a brutal IMF structural adjustment program, leading to a popular uprising that Carlos Andrés crushed (the "Caracazo"). But at the time, many people saw Chávez's attempt as disconnected from the popular movement, which it wasn't, completely, as we now know. So, the EZLN uprising was different in the sense that it wasn't a group of military officers from the old armed forces claiming to be rescuing the nation, but a ragtag peasant Indian army storming the high heavens.

And this leads me to point two:

(2) The seeming long odds of the Zapatista uprising, which follows the improbable strategic implication of Brecht's Galileo ("When Truth is too weak to prevail, it must go on the attack"), are a peculiarity of these new movements. Hence the emphasis on values of solidarity, not abstractly brandished, but by reference to the actual living experience of concrete communities (Indians, "minorities," etc.). It gives these movements the moral high ground, even if they appear quixotic, tactically unable to back up with resources and deeds what they claim to pursue. Their effect is rather the demonstration a la Numantia that Rome will not pass, that not every atom of human dignity can submit to the aegis of capital.

Not reported, but probably also in the heads of these thinkers is the organizational continuity linking Chiapas 1994 with Seattle 1999 and the wave of revolutions in North Africa, the Indignados in Spain, etc.

My qualm with Gonzalez Casanova and Sousa Santos (as reported by HB) is that they overstate the case that today's movements are better equipped than previous international uprisings (e.g. the socialist wave from the late 19th century, which its latest sequel was perhaps the de-colonization movement in postwar Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean). In a sense, of course they are. No doubt, people today are in a much better position to turn things around globally than any prior generation. And the necessity to turn things around is now felt most urgently than ever. But it is also true that something will be lost (and it will cost us dearly) if we discard tabula rasa the rich experience of the Marxist socialist movement, rather than reclaim it critically.

That is my issue with the third-campism that is so agile at distancing itself from the Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban experience. Lenin had a point when he warned his comrades against the "cult of spontaneism." The Occupy movement should be grand enough to embrace and vindicate the experience of all the prior struggles that working people, the oppressed, the wretched of the Earth have waged through history.



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