Re: AUT: Re:Sylvie and George

[Paul Mattick <mattickp@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Good questions.
as a visiting Mexican friend put it recently, the Chiapas uprisings have
been a sort of living symbol of revolt, however weak the "material
connection" (as Marxists used to say) between it and other struggles, and
howeever doomed to failure those uprisings are.
"Charles Reeve" also recently made the interesting point, in criticism of
his own writing, that he now thinks the EZLN has been of importance to the
ex-leninist left in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America because of its
break with the old Guevarist model of the guerilla--its hovering in a
somewhat undetermined way between leninist vanguardism, social democracy,
and nonparty popular mobilization.
Paul

On Sat, 21 Mar 1998, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:

> Well, as I remember, the critical history of the organzing strategies in
> the 70s was fascinating; it is a serious piece of research from which I
> learned a lot. Perhaps along with the focus on the nastiness of ancient
> Aztec society or reactionary nature of contemporary indian culture, there
> should have been  some recognition of how shot through with anti-Indian
> racism Mexican culture is today. How else are we to understand nation- and
> region-wide support for the EZLN?  I think you will find city "indians",
> even proletarian Marxist economist types, who while they have no interest
> in or nothing to gain from the specific land claims of the EZLN still
> express caution in their evaluation of the Chiapas uprising.
>
> Why is that?
>
> Perhaps it is feared that  ruthless leftist critique is just  more of that
> racist culture of enforced silence anytime an indian complains of social
> humiliation and suffering? Does even uprising become another reason to
> ridicule indians? Does the assumption that behind the uprising can only be
> Leninist-Maoist militants not suggest, yet again, that the mass of indians
> themselves are simply too dumb to act on their own or to change their own
> culture--just as the US National Security State claimed that behind any
> third world revolution could only be white Russian Leninists, organizing
> and duping the backward third world peasants? In short, while the ab irato
> critique is a tremendously enlightening on the reactionary nature of the
> EZLN, the Chiapas uprising is more than Marcos and the EZLN, and it is
> bound to have great significance in a society shot through with anti-indian
> racism and in this sense it would be interesting to know of what the
> uprising has meant to indians outside of chiapas. That seems a more
> interesting question than the meanings Chiapas has for norteamericanos. Ha
> ha...
>
> Best,
> Rakesh
>
>
>
>
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