Although I pride myself in being knowledgeable about Latin American
politics, I was astonished to discover how little I knew about the origins
of the Zapatista struggle. The left has paid much attention to the
elliptical but inspired communiquis of Subcommandante Marcos. We have also
participated in and studied Zapatista solidarity movement and off the
Internet. Our analysis of why Mayan peasants launched the struggle in the
first place has not kept pace unfortunately with these other activities.
Theory has lagged behind practice. The purpose then of this post is
threefold. I want to identify the root causes of the Zapatista rebellion.
Next, I want to reply to a Harry Cleaver's idea that the Zapatista
movement represents some kind of new paradigm for the left. Finally, I
want to shed light on the explosive class/indigenous aspects of the
struggle in the context of my continuing study of these issues.
It is rather surprising that for all the discussion of the Zapatistas in
the mass media and the Internet, there are actually very few scholarly
works written in English. Journalist John Ross wrote a book 4 years ago
that is now out of print. Dan La Botz, author of the excellent book on the
Teamsters for Democratic Union called "Rank and File Rebellion," has
written a study of the overall political and economic crisis in Mexico
that I suspect is quite good, given his track record.
However, I can't imagine a more useful or informative book than George
Collier's "Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas," published
by Francis Ford Lappe's outstanding Food First Foundation. Collier, an
anthropologist, has spent 30 years researching peasant life in Chiapas.
His father was John Collier, Sr., who was Commissioner of Indian Affairs
under Franklin Roosevelt and an activist for indigenist causes. My remarks
on Chiapas are drawn from his excellent book that I recommend to everybody
for more complete information. (Food First is at www.foodfirst.org.)
It is important to realize that the peasant rebellion broke out in Chiapas
for reasons almost identical to rebellions in Peru and Guatemala
previously reported on: land hunger. While the Mexican Revolution
delivered the most substantial land reform in Latin American history, it
never broke from the capitalist system. So the contradictions of the
capitalist system have attacked the land claims of the indigenous peoples
and the peasants, no matter how sweeping the various land reform acts. In
Peru and Guatemala, semi-feudalism confronted the largely Indian
peasantry. In Mexico, it has instead been the undiluted machinations of
capitalism itself.
In 1914, as a consequence of the original Zapata revolution, debt slavery
was abolished in Mexico. Even though this semi-feudal institution
disappeared, the naked forces of capitalism continued to kept the peasant
oppressed. The most notable example was the ability of non-Indians to
purchase communal lands owned by impoverished Indian communities in the
highlands of southern Mexico. In their place, cattle ranches and coffee
plantations soon appeared. Now that the landless peasant was forced to
earn his wage, he had no choice except to work for the capitalist rancher
or farmer. The formal debt slavery may have been abolished, but the Indian
farmhand stayed tied to the "padron."
A new upsurge in the Mexican Revolution took place in the 1930s during the
administration of President Lazaro Cardenas, father of Cuauhtemoc
Cardenas. Responding to the plight of the peasants who never received the
full land benefit of land in 1914, he enacted a new agrarian reform.
Cardenas, like FDR, was not committed to total social transformation. His
reforms, like our own New Deal, were arguably intended to stabilize the
capitalist system itself. By co-opting the Mexican peasantry, as FDR was
attempting to do vis-a-vis the American working-class, Cardenas hoped to
reduce social inequality and boost confidence in the social system in one
fell swoop.
His main concern was to help Mexico recuperate from the devastating
effects of the 1929 crash. The Great Depression curtailed demand for
Mexican exports, which resulted in the loss of foreign capital that the
bourgeoisie required for industrial development. Cardenas put forward an
alternate development model. He instituted a six-year plan that would
replace export-oriented agriculture with new domestic industrialization
based on peasant production of cheap food. In order to free up land for
the production of foodstuffs for the internal market, the government began
to expropriate land from stagnant commercial estates. The land was turned
over to ejidos, lands controlled by largely Indian peasant communities.
Chiapas benefited substantially from this land reform and a base for the
governing PRI party that extended well into the 1960s.
Even though the powerful PRI party had committed itself to land reform,
there were serious obstacles to its implementation in Chiapas. The main
problem is that it sometimes took years for the government agencies to
adjudicate land claims. The endemic lack of democracy in Mexico means that
corruption and favoritism often determines who gets land. The review
process is also a frustrating bureaucratic experience. Collier states:
"According to one study, land claims involved some twenty-two different
government groups and public agencies and a twenty-seven-step process
requiring almost two years of bureaucratic effort, if the claim was
unopposed. In Chiapas, according to the same study, it took an average of
more than seven years for the federal government to approve claims that
had already been provisionally accepted by state authorities. It is
understandable that being to 'hurry up and wait' caused strain between
peasants in eastern Chiapas, who have generated hundreds of claims in
recent decades, and agrarian officials."
The process might be likened to securing an apartment in public housing in
New York City, where you have to have influential friends in the
bureaucracy. In the meantime, you have to either live on the streets or on
the couches of friends. Picture that process and deepen the economic
misery tenfold and you might understand what was causing the Chiapas
peasantry to turn to armed struggle. Not only would you not have a place
to live, neither would you have food to eat since you lacked land to grow
your own and the cash to buy any in the stores.
Before they picked up the gun, they organized themselves into aboveground,
legal protest groups. The most significant example was the Indigenous
Congress that met in 1974 in order to codify Mayan demands. This Congress
met at almost the same exact time as a similar gathering taking place in
Nicaragua to promote Miskitu interests during the Somoza regime. In both
Mexico and Nicaragua, the Church played a key role in bringing Indian
activists together. In Mexico, stepped up activity soon followed as
catechists met with indigenous leaders throughout Chiapas. Since Chiapas
was home to many Protestant sects as well, the activists decided that a
nonsectarian movement was needed. This led them to found Popular Politics
in 1978, which gradually began to reduce the role of the church-based
catechists.
The mobilization of indigenous peoples, as we have sadly grown accustomed
to hearing, was not greeted with universal acclaim by the Marxist movement
in Mexico. Collier comments that "many intellectuals denied the political
potential of the country's indigenous peoples and claimed that they were
not worth organizing because they represented an anachronistic, regressive
sector of society that impeded the development of the proletarian class
consciousness needed to overthrow capitalism." In other words, they were
dogmatic Marxists.
Other left-leaning intellectuals disagreed. Arturo Warman, author of We
Come to Object: The Peasants of Morelos and the National State, "argued
that peasant production, spurred by Lazaro Cardenas's agrarian reform in
the 1930s, had been indispensable to the development of Mexico's urban
economy by providing cheap food and thus enabling industry to keep wages
low." Alain de Janvry wrote that peasants should be considered
semiproletarians because they also sold their labor in the cities on a
seasonal or part-time basis. What was presumably lacking in their
scholarship, however, was an engagement with the indigenous as opposed to
class interests of the peasants, a sign of economic reductionism that
while not as deadly as their ideological foes, was nonetheless a hindrance
to a deeper understanding.
What finally drove the Chiapas peasantry to the point of revolt was
ironically the oil-boom of the 1970s. Capitalist (and vulgar Marxist)
development models assume that as wage labor and capitalist agriculture
displaces subsistence agriculture, the result will be smiling factory
workers who will enjoy the bounties of consumer goods at their local
grocery. Many peasants went to work in the oil and related construction
industries in southern Mexico in this period, but the results were
increasing misery. The way in which this took place is a telling case
study of why capitalism is an irrational system.
After OPEC rose oil prices in 1972, the Mexican government decided to
expand production for the export market. In a world glutted by
petrodollars, it found it easy to finance the expansion of oil production
and ambitious infrastructure projects. The government completed two major
hydroelectric power projects in Chiapas. As the oil economy heated up, the
southeastern portion of the country began to supply Mexico with half of
its hydroelectric power and much of the oil for export.
During this same period, Mexican agriculture went into a steep decline as
the country experienced what some development economists refer to as oil
syndrome, or Dutch disease. This refers to how export booms, oil in
particular, undermine other sectors of a country's economy. The Dutch
experienced this phenomenon when North Sea gas development caused other
branches of the economy to wither. There is nothing that finance capital
loves better than a quick buck. In Mexico's case, while oil-centric
industry expanded from 27 percent of the GDP in 1965 to 38 percent in
1982, the agricultural share fell by half.
Behind these raw statistics are a radical transformation of social
relations in the countryside. Farmworkers left the countryside in huge
numbers to take up employment in Mexico City or the United States. During
the presidency of Luis Echeverria (1970-76), agriculture shifted from
basic staples like corn to export crops such as fruit and beef. By 1980
Mexico was importing 25 percent of its corn.
Some of the Chiapas peasantry seemed fortunate enough to land jobs in the
new oil and construction industries. The entry of this people into the
wage economy spawned a new class of upwardly mobile businessmen in the
region. When a construction worker invested his wages into a trucking,
retail or construction company, it became possible to move up rapidly in
the humble Chiapas economic hierarchy. That many of these new
entrepreneurs were Indians themselves did not lessen the class oppression
as the rich took advantage of the poor in the changing economy.
The biggest changes occurred in agriculture, however. Peasants who
invested their wages in "improved" farming techniques transformed the
landscape of Chiapas as they discovered the dubious benefits of pesticides
and herbicides. This meant that fewer peasants could produce more
commodities for the export market, but the old communal ties began to
break down as class differences divided wealthy peasants from the
"redundant" ones. This process was particularly pronounced in the region
of Zinacanteco, as Collier describes:
"The chemically intensive, but not labor intensive, method of farming also
undermined the social organization of many peasant hamlets by removing a
certain safety net of mutual dependence that kept young and poor people
who needed food bound to their older and wealthier neighbors who, when
weeding and cultivating had been done by hand, needed people to help them.
Prior to the 1980s, Zinacantan had been a place where the disadvantaged
could count on others for their basic livelihoods as long as they were
willing to help out with corn production. But as maize cultivation was
displaced from its once central place in Zinacanteco life, the poor found
themselves utterly marginalized; their labor in the fields was no longer
required and they lacked any way of earning the money necessary to buy
food."
The final blow came in 1992 when the Mexican government decided to end the
agrarian reform once and for all. The oil boom had ended and Mexico went
into a steep debt-based crisis. The PRI made a decision that agricultural
exports could help lift Mexico out of the Depression, bringing an end to
the land reform policies that had been a core principle of the ruling
party for half a century. This had a devastating effect in Chiapas, where
landless peasants now saw no way out of their misery. An intellectual who
had moved to Chiapas to help organize the peasantry along militant
class-struggle lines spoke for the peasants when he stated that only armed
struggle could change things. His name was Marcos and he said:
"[The government] really screwed us, now that they destroyed Article 27
[the legal basis for land distribution], for which Zapata and his
Revolution fought. Salinas de Gortari arrived on the scene with his
lackeys, and his groups, and in a flash they destroyed it. We and our
families have been sold down the river, or you could say that they stole
our pants and sold them. What can we do? We did everything legal that we
could do so far as elections and organizations were concerned, and to no
avail."
As nearly everybody knows, Harry Cleaver has not only been a tireless
activist both on and off the Internet for the Zapatista cause. The example
he has set is not only important for this particular struggle, but for
others as well, including a labor movement which is more and more becoming
internationalized. The sort of instantaneous electronic information that
sprung up around the EZLN is now being deployed for the "wharfies" in
Australia. If war comes to Colombia, there is no question that the
Internet will serve as a brain and nervous system for a broad movement
fighting US intervention in that country.
I do have differences with Harry that I want to take up in this section of
my post. It has to do with our understanding of the classic Marxist
analysis of the role of the state, which tends to get fudged in his
articles. Let us take a look at the concluding paragraph of his paper "The
Zapatista Effect and the Cyberspacial Subversion of Foreign Policy:"
"While the capacity of such grassroots groups for collective protest
action has been clearly demonstrated, their potential for taking over or
usurping the functions of the nation-state and intergovernmental
organizations will certainly turn on their capacity to elaborate and
implement alternative modes of decision making and collective or
complementary action to solve common or related problems. In some
instances, such as the defense of human rights, ecological protection or
the formulation of new constitutional frameworks for the protection of
indigenous rights, this potential is already being realized. The strongest
argument for the continued primary roles of the nation state and private
corporations has been their ability to get things done. It seems highly
likely that the amount of political will to displace them will depend on
the emergence of what are viewed as practical and more attractive
alternatives. So far, grassroots alternatives have demonstrated that
imagination, creativity and insight can generate different approaches and
new solutions to solving widespread problems. To the degree that such new
solutions proliferate and are perceived as effective, the possibilities of
replacing state functions with non-state collaboration will continue to
expand. At the same time, because such an expansion threatens the
established interests of states and those who benefit from their support,
state efforts at repression or co-optation of such alternatives will
continue. The degree to which the autonomy of grassroots efforts will be
maintained will not be a question of imagination or organizational ability
alone, but of their political power to resist such efforts and displace
governmental hegemony. For this reason, the scope for the positive
elaboration of grassroots initiatives at both local and global levels will
depend entirely on their negative power to challenge existing policies and
force concessions. In this drama we are barely into the opening act."
This statement fails to come to grips with the central problem for
progressive politics in the modern era. The old state of the capitalist
ruling class has to be smashed to pieces in order for a new state to come
into existence that represents the true interests of workers and peasants.
In Marxist jargon, this is called the dictatorship of the proletariat. The
particular strand of Marxism that Harry identifies with tends to identify
this paradigm with all the old abuses and failures of the Soviet model.
Unfortunately, as long as the ruling class has the army and police at its
disposal, it is very difficult to achieve significant structural change.
In the case of Chiapas, the land will not be distributed to the hungry
peasants unless a government that represents their interests comes to
power. Furthermore, this government can not be elected. It has to ensue
out of an armed struggle, such as the kind that toppled Somoza or Batista.
While it is not unprincipled to urge a vote for Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, it
would be foolish to think that his presidency would change anything in
Mexico as long as the army and police remained intact. It would be nothing
but a replay of the Allende regime in Chile.
The reason that the Zapatista struggle is attractive to post-Marxists like
Harry and Roger Burbach is that it tends to bracket out the whole nasty
question posed in Lenin's "State and Revolution." Since the EZLN has
little chance to lead a successful revolution as long as the rest of
Mexico remains at a lower level of struggle, there is a tendency to
identify with the movement as movement. It reminds me of the sort of
infatuation with movement politics that characterized the German Social
Democracy at the turn of the century when the actual problem of taking
power receded into the background to a vanishing point.
While it is true that the Zapatistas have no immediate prospect of taking
power, it is also true that their struggle is exactly suited to the task
at hand, which is extracting reforms from the Mexican government. The only
way to achieve reforms is by struggling in a militant, if not
revolutionary, fashion. The peasants of Chiapas attempted reforms through
the system in the 1980s and have discovered that the only way the Mexican
government will take them seriously is if they arm themselves and launch
guerrilla warfare.
I want to conclude by suggesting a different perspective from which to
view the Zapatista struggle and that is as part of the hemispheric wide
struggle of indigenous peoples for economic and cultural survival. There
should be little doubt that the underlying dynamics of the Zapatista
struggle is like that of the Shining Path of Peru, or the Guatemalan
Guerrilla Army of the Poor. It is a combined indigenous and agrarian
struggle against capitalist oppression which is centered on the fight for
land.
Peru and Guatemala are in a simmering state right now and there is every
possibility that the revolts might come to a full boil at some point in
the future. Although Colombia does not have a large indigenous population
as such, the meztiso population of the country could easily identify with
such struggles to their West and North. The Colombian peasants may have
not descended from mighty indigenous empires like the Inca or the Maya,
but they still understand that their class interests are the same as the
Peruvian and Guatemalans.
The Chiapas struggle is probably serving to inspire an upsurge in the
North American Indian movement. In the various newspapers and Internet
forums devoted to the Indian struggle, there is constant discussion of the
importance of Chiapas. When I went to a powwow in the East Village a few
months ago, there were leaflets everywhere announcing a protest at the
Mexican consulate. The AIM leaders who visited Nicaragua to offer
solidarity to the Miskitus will undoubtedly be called upon to extend their
support to the Chiapas Indians. This cause will be much less ambivalent
than the one took place in Nicaragua.
The Latin American population in the United States continues to grow. The
New York Times reported that there are 200,000 Mexicans living here,
mostly from the state of Puebla. They were driven from Mexico by the same
sort of economic contradictions that plague Chiapas. The Times reports
that many do not even speak Spanish, but one or another Indian language,
including Mextico. If the struggle in Mexico grows to the next level,
there is every possibility that this segment of the population can be
drawn into struggle in the northeast, the central states and the Pacific
Coast. New York City is also home to tens of thousands of Colombians. If
the United States decides to invade Colombia to help wipe out the
guerrillas at the same time that it is involved in suppressing revolts in
Peru and southern Mexico, Latin American nationalism and internationalism
might be felt from as far south as Argentina to as north as Boston.
In the meantime, the American Indian movement continues to assert itself.
The Blackfeet peoples of the United States and Canada have decided that it
is up to them to determine what the geographical and cultural boundaries
of their nation should be. More power to them. As they and other North
American Indian nations find ways to make their own alliances, they will
certainly find an affinity with struggles to their south.
Such struggles will reverberate with those of other land-based peoples in
Africa, from the Ogoni in Nigeria, to the aborigines in Australia. The
issues are almost the same everywhere you go. They are the desire for
economic development for the good of the people rather than the predatory
corporations in their midst, respect for the ecology of the ancestral
lands and the need to preserve cultural identity, including language and
religions.
The Internet can and certainly be used to advance and link up these
struggles. Over this particular point I have no difference with Harry.
Even now the theoretical differences over the nature of the state might
seem somewhat academic. However, as these struggles deepen and the
conquest of power becomes more and more of an immediate task, they
certainly will have to be resolved.
In my next post, I will return to the United States and write about the
year 1890 and what attitude Marxists should have taken toward the American
Indian people that year when ghost dancing, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show
and the invasion of Hawaii were all taking place.
Louis Proyect
