AUT: comments on Massimos' paper

[Montyneill@xxxxxxx]

Below are excerpts from a posting to Massimo in response to his paper. I
could only download paper and still have it readable, so have limited my
retyping of excerpts from his paper -- I hope still that the points below
will make sense to the reader. -- Monty Neill

Massimo, thank you for a thoughtful paper.  A few things that struck as worth
commenting on:

1) Toward the end of the intro you say, "the indigenous population of Chiapas
are, taken in isolation from the international division of labor, absolutely
nobody and invisible. (3) This invisibility, this complete atomisation of the
entiure population withint the huge global productive machine is not only a
characteristic of the Maya people."  Note (3) quotes Mayor Ana Maria from the
first encuentro: "We don't have words. We don't have face. We don't have
name.We don't have tomorrow. We do not exist"...."For power, what today is
known in the world with the anme of 'neoliberalism,' we do not count, we do
not produce, we do not buy, we do not sell. We were a useless number for the
accounting of big capital."

I think there is a lot here that needs to be unpacked and analyzed. I am not
sure what you mean by "taken in isolation ... absolutely nobody." I do not
read Mayor Ana Maria as referring to "complete atomization" but to a view
(which Marcos also has stated several times) that the Chiapanecan indigenous
are not part of global accumulation ("a useless number..."). Since capital
wants to use the space and put the people ultimately to work as "productive"
(for capital), it becomes necessary to remove them. Since the working of the
market by itself has not succeeded, capital turns (as you correctly note,
later) to the military. That is, capital faces people who are not atomized,
and seeing them as an obstacle, attempts to atomize them, thus creating a
situation of at least ethnocide. (In your section 'life... ' you elaborate on
the ethnocidal attack.) That is, invisibility is not necessarily atomization.


As to invisibility, I read Ana Maria as saying, 'capital says we can do what
we want, we do not see (recognize) you" -- again, not that the unseen are
fragmented. In short, you are confoundign the situation of the indigenous
with the indigenous' perspective as to how capital sees them.

I am not at all sure I am in agreement with the claim that the indigenous are
outside of capital accumulation. Many of them work in various ways for
capital (the book Ya Basta explained a lot of this, the employment sometimes
offered and sometimes taken). I discuss some of this in the long version of
"Toward a New Commons," which circulated earlier and is still posted. As
indigenous on their land, however, they may well not be productive for
capital, and even if they are, capitalists have ideas as to how to make their
space more productive, which requires moving them.

One broader issue raised here is whether capital's newly expanded reserve
army of labor, created under neoliberalism, is part of capital's
productivity. Marcos (including in his theses on globalization) and I think
here Ana Maria say no. In our Midnight Notes issue "New Enclosures," George
Caffentzis shows, in "On Africa and Self-Reproducing Automata," how central
the apparently "non-productive" and "outside of capital" people (here with a
focus on Africa) are to the process of capitalist accumulation. This is not
the issue you deal with, but your discussion indirectly raises it.

2) I was going to raise the issue of democracy, but Zeynep did a better job
of it than I would. I would only add that later when you note women fighting
patriarchy within the Zapatista communities, this implies possible problems
with consensus as praticed there and suggests more broadly that consensus can
apparently occur in situations of inequality within the community in which
people agree to support those with more power.

3) Lest we be seen as offering only criticism, your footnote 14 on
'nationalism' is excellent. Perhaps rather than a note it should be in the
text, particularly since the piece is about Zapatista internatioalism.

6) I think you do fairly well elaborating on themes of difference, starting
from Mayor Ana Maria's " all humans are equal because they are different"
through the overcoming of fragmentation through a common affirmation of
dignity (and thus to having both difference and unity). I think this
parallels the discussion in "towards a new commons," but with some useful
different emphases. Correctly, I think, it suggests that coming together must
be more than a statement of negativity (against capital). To some extent you
offer the positive basis of the coming together as poetry, quoting the
Zapatistas: "that nation without nationality..." but I think takes a few more
positive steps in attempting to concretize in social life these underlying
aspects. Still, they remain somewhat too abstract for me ("dignity, hope,
life"). I think the limitations of your discussion are parallel to
limitations I'm seeing in the documents from the encuentros and in
my/Midnight Notes own work, limitations rooted in the actual limitations of
the struggles our class has been able to wage in recent times. What that
leads me to is thinking of what work we need to do, what questions we need to
ask, hopefully in some shared, common fashion. Unfortunately, I am not seeing
much of that since the encuentro, which disturbs me greatly.

That all leads to to a question of the purpose of your piece, as it does not
appear to ask any questions, but I think we have a lot more questions than
answers. I think this piece adds to those which can help us begin to define
some terrain and issues, and I think there is value in they way you describe
and propose Zapatista internationalism.

7) Your long paragraph at the end of section 3 which begins, "If dignity,
hope and life are the elements of this new revolutionary internationalism,
then the latter is not instrumental to the fight against capital, but it has
as starting point the constitution of humanity. In this context the fight
against capital becomes a residual..."

I think there is something more here than you make out of this introduction,
but I cannot quite put my finger on it, there are implications here you have
not developed about the distinction between the old revolutionary practice
and the new. (Also, in your note 17 you refer to "two approaches" in a way
that I find the reference not clear -- which two approaches, objective vs
subjective or old vs new internationalism?) You move in this paragraph to the
discussion of revolution as question not answer, citing Holloway, posing the
issue of self-empowerment and then citing Marcos crituque of the DPR, "not to
seize power but to exercise it."

Well and good, but this all needs a lot more discussion and analysis. You say
both the "old" and the Zapatistas start from peoples immiseration and
exploitation, but then distinguish between an instrumentalism based in
"realization" of the possble (taking from your earlier discussion of Hardt
discussing Deleuze) and the EZLN's "asking we walk" -- though that
formulation may not be parallel to the one from Hardt you develop earlier. I
am not sure either formulation explores sufficiently the idea that "the fight
against capital becomes a residual." Taken at face value, the idea strikes me
as a waying of saying we begin by our assertions of dignity and hope, that we
then come to see capital as being in the way, so must struggle against
capital, developing a common no. But behind/beneath that is actually a common
yes, the affirmation of dignity -- but realizing it will mean different lived
things for different people in different situations. If that is something of
what you mean, then our questions are in part to explore more concretely this
possibility of commonality, that we need not have only a common no but a yes
that is simulaneously common and varied/different (hence, again, Ana Maria's
quote about difference).

So, maybe what you need to do here is elaborate a bit more, take apart the
long paragraph and structure a bit more detailed explanation and a sense of
where this discussion might go.

8) Two little things, uses of words, that may or may not suggest
contradictions with yourself: a) at the end of section 3, saying "people with
no partly or organization" and in the final paragraph referring to "they are
organizational forms nonetheless"; and b) in the third from last paragraph,
you refer to "alternative visions are possible and real" which linguistically
(at least) does not fit your development from Hardt against "possible" and
linking that term to the old internationalist politics we are trying to
supercede in practice.

9) I think you show some ways in ways in which a new internationalism --
better, an intercontinentatlism? a "planetarization" (our, Midnight Notes
term) in opposition to globalization that perhaps gets past the dead hand of
the term "internationalism"? -- is developing with the Zapatistas and the
encuentros as leading examples. I am not sure the various distinctions you
are trying to develop, however, quite work. I hope I've been at least a
little help in showing where and why that is the case.

Again, thanks for the work you are doing. If I can get back to this soon and
have more to say, I'll send it.

Monty


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