Re: Zapatistas & Desire for Mod Cons (was Re: Foster responds)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>Far from denying or rejecting the gains of capitalism, they want to
>benefit from them.  Somehow this desire for modernization --
>including desire for mod cons pooh-poohed by some Greens in rich
>nations -- that animates mass struggles everywhere in the world is
>often ignored or dismissed in PEN-l discussion of colonialism, out of
>touch with present-day reality.
>
>Yoshie

Understanding Chiapas

Although I pride myself in being knowledgeable about Latin American
politics, it astonished me to discover how little I knew about the origins
of the Zapatista struggle. The left has paid much attention to the
elliptical but inspired communiqués of Subcommandante Marcos. We have also
participated in and studied the Zapatista solidarity movement on 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 Harry Cleaver's idea that the Zapatista
movement represents some kind of new paradigm for the left. Finally, I want
to examine the explosive class/indigenous aspects of the struggle in the
context of my continuing study of these issues.

Despite 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. 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 draw extensively 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 those behind the rebellions in Peru and
Guatemala I 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
became illegal 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 had to earn his
wage, he had no choice except to work for the capitalist rancher or farmer.
The formal debt slavery may have disappeared, 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, had no committment to total social transformation. His reforms, like
our own New Deal, served to stabilize the capitalist system itself. By
co-opting the Mexican peasantry, as FDR was attempting to do vis-à-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 state turned land
over to ejidos, which the largely Indian peasant communities controlled.
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."

We can compare the process 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 in the context of a tenfold
economic misery 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 to create
a nonsectarian movement. This led them to found Popular Politics in 1978,
which gradually began to reduce the role of the church-based catechists.

In a by now depressing pattern, the Marxist movement in Mexico did not
greet the mobilization of indigenous peoples with universal acclaim.
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 concluded that peasants were really 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. This economic reductionism was not as deadly as that of their
ideological foes, but was still a hindrance to a deeper understanding and a
poor guide to action.

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
displace subsistence agriculture, the result will be benign. Smiling
factory workers 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 raised 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.

A radical transformation of social relations in the countryside was taking
place behind this rather dry set of statistics. 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. When 1980 arrived, Mexico was importing 25 percent of its
corn.

Some of the Chiapas peasantry was fortunate enough to land jobs in the new
oil and construction industries. The entry of these 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 extreme 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 conclusively. 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. Thus it brought to 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."

Everbody knows that Harry Cleaver has 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 that 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 the classic Marxist analysis of the role of the
state, with which his articles disagree. 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. The armed revolution must smash the old state to
pieces in order for a new state to come into existence that represents the
true interests of workers and peasants. In Marxist jargon, we call this the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Alas, there is no better term to take its
place. 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, hungry peasants will not receive land until a
government that represents their interests comes to power. Furthermore, it
is impossible to elect such government. 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 such
as 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 appropriate 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 that centers 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 extend their support to the
Chiapas Indians. This cause will be much less politically 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. The same sort of economic contradictions that
plague Chiapas drove them from Mexico. 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 Latinos across the United States will join in powerful
solidarity movement. New York City is also home to tens of thousands of
Colombians. What if the United States decides to invade Colombia to help
wipe out the guerrillas at the same time that it is trying to suppress
revolts in Peru and southern Mexico? Latin American nationalism and
internationalism might explode from as far south as Argentina to the
northern cities such as Boston and Chicago.

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, we on the left will have
to debate and resolve these questions in a comradely fashion.


Louis Proyect
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