Chiapas Support Committee
Home of the Compañero Manuel blog on zapatistas & mexico
CompArte 2 | The Emiliano Zapata Community Festival | Oakland, CA
CompArte 2 | The Emiliano Zapata Community Festival
Saturday, August 12, 2017 | 1:00-10:00pm | Free/Gratis
At the Omni Commons, 4799 Shattuck Ave, Oakland, California 94609
CompArtistas SCHEDULE
1:00-1:30pm Welcome & Opening by Chiapas Support Committee Oakland & Calpulli Huey Papalotl
1:30-3:30pm Workshops for human liberation
• What is Zapatismo?
Led by members of the Chiapas Support Committee, presentation & dialogue on the history of the Zapatista struggle and movement in Mexico; guiding principles & values, building an Indigenous Council of Government with Indigenous people and what Zapatismo means in the U.S.
• Learn the basics of Danza Mexica with Patricia Chicueyi Coatl from Calpulli Huey Papalotl:
Through centuries, through millenia, Danza Danza Mexica-Chichimeca , Mitotiliztli, has been a form of education and discipline for our Native Anahuacan people. Brave guerrerx have so valiantly fought to protect these Sacred Traditions, especially Tlahtouani Cuauhtemoc, right after the European Invasion, and our beloved Tlacatecuhtli Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution.
Come learn the basics of strong and beautiful form or danza-prayer created by our Anahuacan Ancestors.
• Son Jarocho writing verses & dancing
María De la Rosa & DíaPaSon artists facilitate community art-making using son jarocho- a living tradition of music and poetry. You’ll learn some basic beats on percussive instruments and then we’ll show you how to layer them to create a basic groove and be “present” with fellow workshop participants. Once we’ve locked in, we will guide you to compose lyrical poetry that expresses collective, universal concerns of the community and set it to melodies used in “Señor Presidente” and “El Canto del Grillo”.
• From the Underground Railroad to the new codes & emblems of solidarity
Marshall Trammell of Music Research Strategies leads participants in an exploration into the ‘technologies’ of warrior ethos of the UGRR-era narratives of solidarity ‘technologies’ as a means to assess social impact methodologies for generating new “codes” and emblems of solidarity into everyday life today.
3:30-4:30 pm Music, Spoken Word & Poetry in resistance against the walls of capitalism
• Francisco Herrera, Caminante Cultural, music
• Elana Chávez, poet
• Muteado Silencio, spoken word
• Cory Aguilar, spoken word
• PoesíaMaríaArte, spoken word
4:30-5:30pm Community meal with tamales, zapatista coffee & aguas frescas
6:00-10:00pm CompArte in Concert for Humanity, Against capitalism, war & racism
• DíaPaSon, son jarocho music & dance
• Black Fighting Formations: Mogauwane Mahloele & Marshall Trammell, South African and African American percussinists perform warrior ethos ritual.
• uPhakamile uMaDhlamini, poet
• Muteado Silencio, spoken word
• Naima Shalhoub+Band
• Arnoldo García, poet
• PoesíaMaríaArte, spoken word
• Los Nadies, dance from below
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Compartir ZapatistArte
CompArte is a play on the Spanish words compartir (to share) and arte (art), so it’s a festival of sharing art in all it’s forms: music, dance, poetry, painting, drawing, sculpture, etcetera, to dream a different world where we all fit.
CompArte is also an international festival, first convened by Zapatista communties in 2016 to celebrate art and culture as a catalyst for social change, in rebellion against capitalism and all its walls of exploitation and oppression: racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, english-only mentalities.
Zapatista supporters created CompArte Festivals all over Mexico and in other countries in 2016. Here in the Bay, the Chiapas Support Committee held a CompArte Festival in Oakland, too.
This year, thanks to support from the Akonadi Foundation, we are able to expand CompArte to add music, dance, workshops, food and much more, free for all our communities.
CompArte brings together the culture, imagination and dreams of those who organize and resist the walls of capitalism and work to build a more just and free community where everyone belongs.
CompArte 2 The Emiliano Zapata Community Festival will be featuring rap, singers, painters, poets, thinkers, revolutionaries, bands and working people bringing their voices, visions and talent to listen to each other and dream out loud the relationships and community of communities we want to make us safer and powerful for justice, solidarity and love.
CompArte will feature a day-long art exibit with the painters and artists on hand to share their work’s relavance to resisting capitalism and constructing another world.
CompArte 2 comes together to explore how to make cracks and fissures in the walls of racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, exploitation and abuse of women, girls, boys, children, the elders and youth, in other words, the planet.
CompArte 2 is a space to dream awake and aloud the world we want to live, work, study, worship and play in.
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The Chiapas Support Committee will be asking those attending to make contributions that will all be given to the Zapatista communities in Mexico.
For more information or to contact the Chiapas Support Committee:
Email CSC: enapoyo1994@yahoo.com
Check out our blog: https://chiapas-support.org/
CompArte 2 The Emiliano Zapata Community Festival in part is made possible by the generous support of the Akonadi Foundation and by the sacrifices, struggles for justice, the dignity and global leadership of the Zapatista communities.
Carlos Gonzalez: “We are going to reorganize the National indigenous Congress”
Carlos González of the National Indigenous Congress with Marichuy.
Carlos Gonzales, a member of the Organizing Committee of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI, its initials in Spanish) was invited on UDGTV radio, where he clarified several things, primarily about the CNI’s process, remembering the CNI’s birth on October 12, 1996, to try to join the country’s indigenous peoples together with two proposals:
- The recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples in the San Andres Accords (1996-2001).
- The reconstitution and reorganization of the Indigenous Peoples that were and continue being devastated by the conquest.
In two decades of existence, Carlos insists that the CNI served as an inspiration, and now with the proposal the struggle of the indigenous peoples becomes visible again, but also the National indigenous Congress.
The CNI did a re-organization in 2013 to form this proposal for the Indigenous Government Council. The proposal’s origin is the state of war that exists in the country. We Indigenous were destroyed, dispossessed, but above all else, since the 80s there is a decided process of physical and cultural extermination. The Indigenous Peoples are obstacles to the development of capitalism.
We Indigenous Peoples have a millennial collective relationship with the land. In 12 years we see how indigenous languages have been extinguished, as Indigenous Peoples had to migrate in massive numbers to the cities or to the United States.
War of extermination
To the question of whether it’s exaggerating to talk about a war of extermination, Carlos Gonzales answered clearly that the Kochimia peoples have lost their language, the Kumiai Kiliwa peoples only have 50 men and women, the Ukapa people are less than 200 and their territory is occupied by foreign companies for mining projects, toxic waste dumps, and wind farms. The Raramuris say that in the last 10 years 30% of their population has lost their language. It’s a cultural extermination that accompanied the physical and material extermination, which has as its goal the dispossession of territories.
Losing the language is losing a relationship that humanity has with nature, the way in which we name things, implies unique thought. Losing a language is to lose a way of naming, relating, becoming familiar with and knowing our world.
Dispossession is not only for the indigenous peoples, but also in the cities (…) like water, housing, exploitation, low salaries, intense work, poverty… it’s the same problem, it’s dispossession and exploitation.
The proposal that we are making, and successfully attained, is to make the indigenous peoples visible. We have now made up our CIG, with one man and one woman from each people of the CNI, and that CIG is a candidate to the presidency of the republic. We want to put the indigenous problem on the national agenda, like the Zapatistas did in 1994, so that their poverty and exploitation are known in the entire world.
We want that proposal to create a bridge to the indigenous peoples that do not participate in the CNI and to Civil Society in order to construct a different Mexico. We are going to construct that program. What’s certain is that we no longer want that capitalism and we no longer want that political class. We want to say that there is another form, another way of governing this country. We don’t want to give money to that gang of thieves so that they leave us in violence and give the country’s resources to foreigners. Better we govern ourselves!
Autonomy
We think about forms of Self-government, each community, each people according to their culture, each non-indigenous urban society according to their historic walking, to their own identities, can and must construct self-government; that’s what we think. Look at the Zapatistas and their Good Government Juntas and their autonomous municipalities, those of Cherán have a council of Elders, the Yaquis have a traditional guard, those in Ostula have a communal guard. Those are definitely models and there are many proposals of autonomy. Autonomy is the exercise of freedom.
What’s important is the organization of those below. We say that the conditions for human life are being destroyed by capitalism, we propose that we can govern ourselves and from below. We are going to occupy the electoral space that is the space of those above, of the rich, of the capitalists, of those who have the monopoly on the political life of this country or think they have, but that space isn’t useful for approaching the common people, the urban and indigenous collectives that are below, within the logic of organizing ourselves.
Knowing whether we win or not is secondary. What interests us is to construct something new.
What’s coming
In the coming weeks we are going to elaborate a work proposal. We are going to present it to the CIG to be revised, modified and approved within the logic of generating a territorial political structure for 2018, and to bring together the signatures that are now almost one million. We are going to reorganize the National Indigenous Congress the same way; before it was only a place for assembly, now it must re-vitalize its organization fundamentally to generate a successful communications policy, indigenous or non indigenous, to be able to articulate with civil society organizations and finally for going out beyond the country, to Latin America and proposing those themes.
Challenges
The organizational challenge is first, we are being diminished in the organization that we have had; a national organizational structure must be formed to be able to articulate with all the peoples and communities of civil society. One must not fall into the temptation to accumulate votes, to compete with other parties, to not fall into the temptation of the vote, of the power, of wanting to win. One must generate the idea and awareness; that is what we want.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Thursday, July 13, 2017
http://espoirchiapas.blogspot.com/2017/07/carlos-gonzalez-cni-vamos-reorganizar.html
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Indigenous Me’phaa set precedent in victory over mining project
ME’PHAA VICTORY OVER HEART OF DARKNESS MINING PROJECT
Residents of San Miguel el Progreso Photo: Tlachinollan Human Rights Center of La Montaña
By: Hermann Bellinghausen
The Me’phaa (Tlapaneca) community of San Miguel el Progreso, or Júba Wajiín, in the municipality of Malinaltepec, Guerrero, literally triumphed over the Heart of Darkness mining project through a legal decision of national transcendence. Upon deciding in favor of the petition for a judicial order of protection (an amparo) [1] that said community requested against mining exploitation in that territory of La Montaña of Guerrero, first district judge Estela Platero Salgado conceded as well-founded the concepts of violation of their rights, and that they demonstrated the failure to fulfill the Mexican State’s constitutional and conventional obligation to respect the rights of this indigenous-agrarian community. [2]
In conversation with La Jornada, Valerio Mauro Amado Solano, president of the commission of communal wealth of Júba Wajiín, describes the extractivist spiral that began to hang over that and other neighboring communities since 2010: “First, pure rumors that they were going put mines without any notification from the government. We were the last to know what they sought to do on our lands. It was said that the Secretariat of Economy (SE) granted the concessions. The commissioners investigated and the SE delayed giving a response for one year, and then telling us that yes, it was true. In 2011, an act of the assembly rejected mining and presented it to the agrarian authority. We sought the protection of Tlachinollan (a human rights center with headquarters in the city of Tlapa), and in 2013 our first request for a protective order was filed.”
Miguel Santiago Lorenzo, a Ñuu Savi (Mixteco) representative who presides over the Regional Council of Agrarian Authorities in Defense of Territory, reminds us that the San Javier, La Diana and Toro Rojo concessions remain in effect on Iliatenco and Malinaltepec lands, granted to Hochschild Mining and Camsim Mines. “In the Council we will remain vigilant about what the government seeks to do.”
As an exception, in the Me’phaa agrarian nucleus of Paraje Montero (Malinaltepec) the assembly gave its approval to the Camsim Company. Totomixtlahuaca (Tlacoapa), Colombia de Guadalupe and Ojo de Agua (Malinaltepec) and the communal wealth (commission) of Iliatenco rejected the projects and announced that they would do everything possible so that the exploitation was cancelled.
Maribel González Pedro, Tlachinollan defender, remembers that there were exploration flyovers of that area in 2011. The SE and the state government divulged that the mining potential in Guerrero represented “a great attraction for national and foreign investment.” It’s appropriate to mention that in 2008 the Goldcorp Company occupied Carrizalillo (municipality of Eduardo Neri) for a succulent extraction of gold. Today, the Carrizalillo zone suffers a strong presence of criminal organizations, one of the secondary effects of mining.
In the heart of darkness
The Observatory of Territorial Institutions reported in 2013 that the affiliate in Mexico of the Hochschild Mining Company of Peruvian origin and British capital received two concessions from the SE: Reducción Norte of Heart of Darkness and Heart of Darkness, which encompassed more than 145,730 acres in the municipalities of San Luis Acatlán, Zapotitlán Tablas, Malinaltepec and Tlacoapa, in which they presumed the existence of gold and silver deposits.
Heart of Darkness would be the largest concession in La Montaña, with 108,084 acres, affecting the indigenous agrarian nuclei of Totomixtlahuaca, Tenamazapa, San Miguel el Progreso, Tierra Colorada, Tilapa, Pascala del Oro and Acatepec.
The number of concessions began to grow in 2005, until involving a third of La Montaña, in other words, 19 municipalities that encompass 1,709,240 acres. The majority of its more than 361,000 inhabitants belong to the Nahua, Me’phaa and Ñuu Savi peoples.
The Tlachinollan Center documents that in La Montaña “the federal government has been granting concessions without the consent of the communities.” For 2016, the SE listed 44 concessions in the Costa-Montaña region. Before the violations of their rights, seventeen agrarian communities decided not to give their approval to mining exploration and exploitation. Júba Wajiín adopted the decision in April 2011. In September 2012 it obtained its registry on the National Agrarian Registry.
Valerio Solano emphasizes that the ancestral community of Júba Wajiín was demanding the titling of its lands since the 1940s, and it wasn’t until 1994 that the Unitary Agrarian Tribunal decided in its favor and the presidential decree was issued. “The process took six decades of struggle.” In 2009, the community joined the Community Police (CRAC-PC). Faced with the threat of mining, their conflicts are usually about boundaries with neighbor communities, and about security.
In 2012, the government decrees a biosphere reserve of 387,790 acres in La Montaña, Armando Campos, also of Tlachinollan, remembers. Since 2004, the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources and the National Forest Commission implanted a UN program that promoted community reserve zones. The same agencies and the Guerrero Intercultural Universidad impelled the reserve, which “restricted activities of the communities on their own lands and made them lose the administration of that territory.” The reserve would affect 13 agrarian nuclei in five municipalities. As a reaction, the communities met in October 2012 and ran into the problem of the mining companies.
Santiago Lorenzo, of the Regional Council, recounts that the indigenous blocked the Intercultural University and achieved the rector’s resignation for impelling the reserve behind the backs of the indigenous peoples. The government cancels the reserve. Then the organized communities start planning to resist mining. The council spreads to encompass 200 communities of 20 agrarian nuclei in eight municipalities of the Costa and La Montaña. The Me’phaa, Nahua, Ñuu Savi, Amuzgo and Afro Mexican peoples champion a resistance that has not been defeated. They have in common that they did not react against mining companies on their ground, but rather before their arrival.
Armando Campos, of Tlachinollan, points out: “There have been five years of legal achievements and declarations about territories free of mining. The legal pincers are closed so that no mining company has a margin of entry.” These peoples had previously refused to pay for environmental services. In 2014, they file their first legal action requesting a protective order, and they win it. The SE appeals the decision to the SCJN in 2015. The companies granted the concession to the Heart of Darkness desisted. In November of that year the SE publishes in the Official Journal of the Federation the declaration of freedom of the land.
“Thus, they stopped a protective order that would set a precedent for declaring the Mining Law unconstitutional,” explains Maribel González. “The SE and the Mining Chamber coordinate with each other to throw out the amparo and avoid an analysis of the Mining Law.” In December, the communities ask for protection against the declaration of freedom of lands, which opens the possibility of granting concessions to other mining companies. “The SE argues that Júba Wajiín ‘is not an indigenous community’ and therefore the right to prior consultation does not apply to it, which offends the Me’phaa.” The judge in Chilpancingo receives the amparo and orders an anthropology expert that favors the indigenous. Although the Mining Law does not recognize such a right, the Constitution and international treaties do.
New achievement
Tlachinollan emphasizes that the judge’s decision in the protective order 429/2016, “is a new achievement for an indigenous community and recognition for the tireless and millennial struggle of San Miguel el Progreso to defend its territory and its life faced with the threat that open sky mining represents.” For the first time, a federal court orders that, if the SE should seek to grant new mining concessions there, “it must comply with its constitutional and conventional obligation in matters of indigenous peoples’ rights.”
The Mining Chamber reacted by presenting to the SCJN the Amicus Curie “Study about the Right to Prior Consultation of Indigenous Peoples and Communities and its problem around mining concessions,” where it requests: “the order of protection be denied” that Júba Wajiín requested, and questions whether prior consultation is necessary in a granting of concessions since “there is no susceptibility of real or potential affectation to the rights of indigenous peoples or communities.”
Valerio Solano proudly expresses: “In our territory we have controlled the violence. Neither the narco or the mining companies enter.” And the defenders from Tlachinollan conclude: “The Regional Council and its struggle are referents for what can be attained when the peoples get together to defend common territory.”
[1] An amparo (protective order) has the practice al effect of a restraining order or an injunction. It prohibits someone from doing something in order to protect someone or something. In this case it prohibits mining on Júba Wajiín lands in order to protect people and land in that community against the adverse effects of mining.
[2] This decision seems to have been issued on June 28, 2017.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Saturday, July 15, 2017
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2017/07/15/politica/010n1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
ART, RESISTANCE AND REBELLION ON THE NET
A Call to join the cybernetic edition of CompArte “Against Capital and its Walls, All the Arts”
July 2017
Compañeroas, compañeras and compañeros of the Sixth:
Artist and non-artist sisters and brothers [hermanoas, hermanas and hermanos] of Mexico and the world:
Avatars, screen names, webmasters, bloggers, moderators, gamers, hackers, pirates, buccaneers and streaming castaways, anti-social network users, reality show antipodes, or whatever-you-call each person on the network, the web, the internet, cyberspace, virtual reality, or whatever-it’s-called:
We are summoning you because there are some questions that are nagging at us:
Is another Internet, that is to say another network, possible? Can one struggle there? Or is that space without precise geography already occupied, captured, coopted, tied, annulled, etceterized? Could there be resistance and rebellion there? Can one make Art on the net? What is that Art like? Can it rebel? Can Art on the net resist the tyranny of codes, passwords, spam as the default search engine, the MMORPGs [massively multiplayer online role-playing games] of the news on social networks where ignorance and stupidity win by millions of likes? Does Art on, by, and for the net trivialize and banalize the struggle, or does it potentiate it and scale it up, or it is “totally unrelated, my friend, it’s art, not a militant cell”? Can Art on the net claw at the walls of Capital and damage it with a crack, or deepen and persist in those that already exist? Can Art on, by, and for the net resist not only the logic of Capital, but also the logic of “distinguished” Art, “real art”? Is the virtual also virtual in its creations? Is the bit the raw material of its creation? Is it created by an individual? Where is the arrogant tribunal that, on the Net, dictates what is and what is not Art? Does Capital consider Art on, by, and for the net to be cyberterrorism, cyberdelincuency? Is the Net a space of domination, domestication, hegemony and homogeneity? Or is it a space in dispute, in struggle? Can we speak of a digital materialism?
The reality, both real and virtual, is that we know next to nothing about that universe. But we believe that in the ungraspable geography of the net there is also creation, art… and, of course, resistance and rebellion.
Those of you who create art there, do you see the storm? Do you suffer from it? Do you resist? Do you rebel?
To try to find some answers, we invite you all to participate… (we were going to put “from any and all geographies”, but we think that the net is the place where geography matters least).
Well, we invite you all to construct your answers, to construct or deconstruct them, with art created on, by, and for the net. Some categories in which you can participate (surely there are more, and surely you are already pointing out that the list is short, but, as you know, “what’s missing is yet to come”) are:
Animation; Apps; Files and databases; Bio-art and art-science; Cyber-feminism; Interactive film; Collective knowledge, Culture jamming; Cyber-art; Documentary web; Experimental economies and finances; DIY electronics, machines, robots and drones; Collective writing; Geo-location; Graphics and design, creative hacking, digital graffiti, hacktivism and border-hacking; 3D printing; Interactivity; Electronic literature and hypertext; Live cinema, VJ [video-jaying], expanded cinema; Machinima; Memes; Narrative media; Net.art; Net Audio; Mediated performance, dance, and theater; Psycho-geographies; Alternate reality; Augmented reality; Virtual reality; Collaborative networks and trans-localities (community design, trans-local practices); Remix culture; Software art; Streaming; Tactical media; Telematics and telepresence; Urbanism and online/offline communities; Videogames; Visualization; Blogs, Flogs [Photoblogs] and Vlogs [Videoblogs]; Webcomics; Web series, internet soap operas, and that which you’ve already noted is missing from the list.
So our invitation is extended to all those persons, collectives, groups, and organizations, real or virtual, that work from autonomous zones online, use cooperative platforms, open source, free software, alternative licenses for intellectual property, and the cybernetic etceteras.
We welcome the participation of all [todoas, todas and todos] culture-makers, independently of the material conditions in which they work.
We invite you also so that different spaces and collectives around the world might show the works in their localities, according to their own customs, ways, interests, and possibilities.
Do you already have something somewhere in cyberspace to tell us, show us, share with us, invite us to build collectively? Send us your link to add to the online exhibition hall of this digital CompArte.
You don’t yet have a place to upload your material? We can offer it to you, and to the degree we’re able we can archive your material so that it is recorded for the future. In that case we would need you to give us a link to the cloud, cybernetic host, or similar thing of your preference. Or send it to us by email, or upload it to one of our clouds or to FTP.
While we are offering to host all the material, because we would like it to be part of the archive of art on the solidarity net, we are also going to link to other pages or servers or geo-locations because we understand that in the age of global capital, it’s strategic to decentralize.
So, as you prefer:
If you want to post the information on your websites, with your ways and customs, we can link to it.
And if you need space, we are also here to host you.
You can write us an email with the information about your participation, for example, the name of the creator(s), title, and the category in which you’d like it to be included, as well as a short description and an image. Also tell us if you have space on the Internet and you just need us to post a link, or if you prefer that we upload it to the server.
The material that we receive from the moment that the convocation is open will be classified in the different categories according to its (un) discipline. The participations will be made public during the days of the festival so that any individual or collective can navigate, use (or abuse) and share it in their meeting spaces, streets, schools, or wherever they prefer.
The participations will be published as posts and links.
We will also publish a schedule for direct streaming. The activities will be archived for anyone who doesn’t get a chance to see them live.
The email to which you should write to send us your links and to communicate with us is:
The page on which the links to the participations will be uploaded, and which will be fully functioning starting August 1 of this year, 2017, is:
On that page, from August 1 until August 12, we will also broadcast streamings and showings of different artistic participations from local cyberspace in different parts of the world.
Welcome, then, to the virtual edition of CompArte for Humanity:
“Against Capital and its Walls, All the Arts… Including the Cybernetic Ones”
Ok, cheers, and no likes but rather middle fingers up and fuck the walls, delete Capital.
From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast,
Sixth Commission, Newbie but On-Line, of the EZLN
(With lots of bandwidth, my friend, at least as far as the waist is concerned -oh yeah, nerd and fat is hot-)
July 2017
San Miguel del Progreso and the heart of darkness
San Miguel el Progreso.
By: Luis Hernández Navarro
Malinaltepec is known as one of the municipalities in La Montaña of Guerrero with the greatest social inequality. Its residents lack sufficient nutrition, good health, dignified housing and adequate public services. Now it will also be known for being one of the epicenters of the national indigenous struggle against mining.
One of its indigenous communities, that of San Miguel del Progreso (Júba Wajíin), just obtained a very important victory, as much in defense of its ancestral territory as in the battle to make evident the unconstitutionality of different articles of the mining law, and its use as the principal instrument to legalize the dispossession and looting of indigenous territories.
The history comes from a while ago. Without the consent of the communities that live in La Montaña and Costa Chica, the federal government granted 44 concessions to mining companies. Nevertheless, 17 agrarian communities of the region agreed not to give their approval to carrying out mining exploration and exploitation activities, formalizing their decision in written records of agrarian assemblies or through uses and customs.
One of the beneficiaries, the English company Hochschild Mining, baptized its mining project in the region with the truculent name of The Heart of Darkness, the same name as the famous novel by Joseph Conrad, in which he traces the portrait of Belgian colonialism in Africa. However, the entrepreneurs didn’t have time to enjoy their business. The struggle of the Júba Wajíin community forced Mexican authorities to cancel those concessions between July and September 2015. Questioning the mining law more in depth was thus avoided. This opened the door for any interested company could request concessions on the cancelled lots, placing the territory of the San Miguel del Progreso community in danger.
Júba Wajíin, countered legally and it won an order of protection so that the Secretariat of Economy would leave without effect a declaration of freedom of lands that would permit any company to request mining concessions within the community’s territory. Moreover, the authority was ordered to have prior consultation with the community in these kinds of proceedings. It’s the second protective order that San Miguel del Progreso has won in federal tribunals.
As the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center of La Montaña explains, this is an unprecedented victory, since, for the first time, the secretary was ordered judicially to leave non-existent a declaration of liberty of lands due to violating the collective rights of indigenous peoples.
The indigenous Me’phaa Júba Wajíin community has centuries of roots in that territory. There, since 2011, its 3,800 inhabitants have defended, inch-by-inch, its natural springs, sacred hills, natural resources, climate diversity, fruit trees, coffee plants and its way of earning a living.
Its struggle is exemplary, as much because of its permanence and organization as for the results that it’s harvesting. Among other reasons, because the community was able to see that the promises of development and wellbeing sold by authorities of the Agrarian Prosecutor’s Office in 2011 so that they would accept the exploitation of their territory, were no more than mere glass beads.
The arguments that the community offers for rejecting the dispossession of its territory are profound. According to Valerio Mauro Amado, its commissioner of communal wealth, “we don’t want the mining companies to enter our territory for any reason, because the water is born there, our sacred places are there and we maintain ourselves from our lands” (https://goo.gl/JKJJ3w).
Anastasio Basurto, San Miguel del Progreso’s commissioner when the resistance began in 2011, explained to the journalist Vania Pigeonutt: “The mining companies are not going to enter, they are not going to enter, we must give life! We don’t want to be like those towns that are getting sick, that changed their lands and are dying.”
The consistency of opposition to the extractive project is explained by the confluence of three actors. In the first place, by the extraordinary organizing ability and solidarity of the Me’phaa people, who have preserved and reinvented their identity with great vigor. The vitality and extent of their associative fabric is as remarkable as their ability to reach agreements through consensus.
Secondly, by the accompaniment and support of the priest Melitón Santillán, born in Iliatenco, who warned of the risks of open sky mining, because “I cannot remain silent in the face of an injustice that is going to be commit against poor people.”
And, finally, the effective and professional advice from Tlachinollan and its allies since 2010 explains it. Tlachi put at the center of community defense the use of the legal margins available in national international legal instruments, not as a rhetorical device to air in public opinion, but rather as a matter to litigate effectively in the tribunals.
The dispossession and looting of indigenous territories throughout the country, with its cause of repression, exploitation and devastation doesn’t stop. The victory of San Miguel del Progreso is one piece of good news. It shows that native peoples’ resistance was able to beat back the modern plunderers in the heart of darkness.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2017/07/11/opinion/015a2pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
The pro-capitalist “left”
Franco Torres photo.
By: Gustavo Esteva
The openly anti-capitalist posture of the CNI’s initiative has provoked very different reactions. It’s useful to examine them by reflecting on what it means today to be against what capital says and does.
The most common reaction to the initiative considers it irrelevant. It is not seen as a real threat. It provokes indifference woven with scorn and rejection. It is seen as settled that the majority of the people will continue enclosed in the capitalist prison, as much by daily dependencies on the system as by their dreams, still formulated in their breast. The conviction would prevail that, despite all its defects, capitalism is to remain and nothing better has been found; rather, the conviction that the strength and characteristics of the dominant regime makes openly confronting it foolish. Whether or not one has a critical position with respect to capitalism, this indifference leads to seeking some form of accommodation with forces that seem unbeatable. The open struggle against capital, like that of the CNI, would lack viability and would be mere illusory rhetoric and even demagogic.
Those who pretend to place themselves on the left of the ideological spectrum often adopt that posture. Their cynicism is scarcely hidden under the umbrella of realism. Pablo Iglesias, of Podemos, pointed it out without shades: “May they stay with the red flag and leave us in peace. I want to win” (Público, 26/06/15). His position is not far from what the so-called “progressive” governments of Latin America adopt. The Marxist García Linera celebrates dependent capitalism, developmentalist and extractivist from Bolivia because, according to him, the fruit of exploitation is distributed there among the people. Mujica, in Uruguay, would have changed his dream of transforming the world through the good administration of capitalism. To Lula, his policies were “all that the left dreamed should be done” (La Jornada, 3/10/10). “A metallurgy worker –said with pride– he is making the greatest capitalization in the history of capitalism…” (Proceso, 1770, 3/10/10) The Brazilian “left” supported his alliance with businessmen and corporations, as does the Mexican “left” by supporting similar alliances with AMLO, which would only seek, according to his own words, to smooth the sharpest edges of neoliberal capitalism.
An argument along the same lines that seeks to be more subtle considers that, unless anti-capitalism achieves a global majority, which seems impossible in the foreseeable future, it would imply renouncing all the fruits of the scientific and technological advances of human history, which capitalism would have absorbed into its production and would now determine necessities and general desires.
There is before all else a clear awareness of the current danger in the anticapitalist posture. The slide into barbarity is no longer a theoretical disjunctive, like that which Rosa Luxemburg proposed a hundred years ago: it’s an immediate threat, already completed in many parts. Fighting against capital is now an issue of survival, because what it does to the environment puts the human species in danger and what it does to the society and the culture destroys the bases of our coexistence and intensifies all forms of the reigning violence.
The fight against capital demands, before all else, recognizing that our necessities are not an imposition on nature, but rather the fruit of dispossession. What we suffer today is similar to that of the comuneros that need housing, food and jobs when in the beginning of capitalism their means of subsistence was expropriated from them. Our desires already have the form of merchandise. Having won first place globally in the per person consumption of cola drinks means that the thirst of a very wide sector of Mexican society has been given a capitalist form.
Recuperating desires and necessities is a necessary step in the struggle against capital. It’s the step that gave Via Campesina, one of the largest organizations in human history, when it maintained that we must define for ourselves what we eat… and produce it. Recuperating the desire for one’s own food, cultivating it on recuperated land or in the backyard of a rented house in the city, implies breaking with the social relations of capitalism, simultaneously recuperating the means of production and autonomous decision-making ability in a central dimension of subsistence.
The Zapatistas have the highest degree of self-sufficiency in all aspects of daily life, without falling into relationships of capitalist production. They did not renounce buying machetes, bicycles or computers on the capitalist market, in which they also place products to satisfy needs and desires that they define more autonomously all the time. It’s about a realism very different from that practiced above.
Their open and decided struggle against capital recognizes without nuances or reservations that “it lacks what it lacks.” Without prescribing recipes for everyone or taking refuge in any universal doctrine, they insist on the need of organizing ourselves, which in practice means that each one, in their time and their geography, must learn to govern themselves and to construct their world beyond the capitalist prison.
Only like that, not with complicit accommodations, can we avoid the barbarity towards which it’s leading us. And this position, against what the pro-capitalist “left” thinks, continuously extends to common people, sometimes because of the mere struggle for survival under the current storm, and other times in the name of old ideals.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Monday, July 3, 2017
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2017/07/03/opinion/019a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Seven reasons to support the CNI-EZLN proposal
By: Gilberto López y Rivas
Ever since they made public the consensus proposal of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), to integrate an Indigenous Gobierno Council for Mexico, whose spokesperson will be registered as an independent candidate for the 2018 presidential elections, we have given the task of participating in the round tables, conversations and workshops to various adherents to the Sixth Declaration, in order to reflect, analyze, expound, and of course debate this singular political action, in its multiple dimensions, challenges and commitments.
We’re dealing with another of the initiatives that come from the indigenous world, and, in particular, from Zapatismo and its close associates, for the purpose of articulating the resistances from below and to the left in order to confront that storm of civilizational scope that constitutes current capitalist globalization and that is expressed in a re-colonization and war of conquest of territories, natural resources, disposable human beings, destruction of nature, which are leading the human species and known life forms on a course to their possible extinction. That is, the current struggle of the indigenous and non- indigenous peoples goes beyond the worn out and dismissed schemes of left and right content, and is situated in the dichotomous position of being in favor of life or death. Rosa Luxemburg, who didn’t live the nightmare of Nazi-fascism or of the current form of criminal and militarized capitalist accumulation set forth almost a century ago, now the disjunctive of socialism or barbarism.
Within this context, what are some of the reasons to assume the CNI-EZLN proposal as our own?
1. It’s an idea discussed in depth by the Zapatista Maya communities, and afterwards by the more than 40 expressions of the original peoples that make up the CNI. It is not the fruit of a group of notables that think for the rest, but rather the result of horizontal deliberations of innumerable assemblies that analyzed it until reaching its approval under one of the principles of “govern obeying: convince and not conquer. It is not an “occurrence” of a determined person, nor does it have concealed governmental promoters that the institutional left and the anonymity of the social networks seek to “denounce.”
2. The integration of an Indigenous Government Council for Mexico is maintained in several decades of de facto autonomous experiences, in the entire geography of our dejected national territory, which contrast notoriously with the corrupt, illegitimate and discredited governments at all three levels and powers of the “partidocracy” that have produced a fed up citizenry and a profound crisis of so-called representative democracy. It’s evident that the group currently in power does not represent the interests of the people and of the Mexican nation, and yield governments of national betrayal that have renounced the exercise of sovereignty, and have delivered the country, its territory, labor force and natural and strategic resources to the transnational capitalist corporations, and have docilely submitted to the economic, political, ideological and military domination of the US, the hegemonic armed branch of global imperialism. The Indigenous Government Council and what results from it, is the embryo of popular representation and national sovereignty, starting from what Article 39 of the Constitution, still in effect, establishes.
3. The Indigenous Government Council and the independent candidacy of Compañera María del Jesús Patricio Martínez come from the sector of the exploited, oppressed and discriminated against that has for decades forged a strategy of resistance against capitalism. The autonomy that it institutes is, at the same time, a practice of government and doing politics radically different than what we know, without bureaucracies, intermediaries, professional politicians and caudillos. Despite the structural precariousness, the counterinsurgency war of attrition, the paramilitaries, organized crime, repression and criminalization of their struggles, these self-governments have shown their ability to organize the peoples in a process of reconstitution, awareness, participation of women and youth, strengthening of ethnic-cultural, national and class identities, through the collective and autonomous appropriation of community security, imparting of justice, health, education, culture, communication and economic and productive activities, as well as the defense of territory and its natural resources.
4. In a country in which the corruption and generalized cynicism of the political class rule, indigenous proposal is founded on the notable ethical congruency of its postulants. The EZLN as well as the CNI have practiced what they preach for decades, and have made the principles of not selling out, not giving up, not betraying, not supplanting or taking advantage of other peoples’ struggles a reality. The “for everyone everything, for us nothing,” is a reality throughout all these years. These organizations have been establishing the popular power of govern obeying, without asking anything in exchange and, despite the difficult living conditions, they have been in solidarity with all the struggles of those below.
5. The candidacy of an indigenous woman goes beyond a politics of quotas and feminist positions that don’t take into account the triple oppression that indigenous women have suffered and the cultural specificity in which they demand full rights. It is situated as a clear response to the reigning patriarchy, from a new face gender politics, whose origin we find in the EZLN’s Revolutionary Law of Women.
6. It’s a proposal inclusive, not only of the indigenous and with the indigenous, which makes the vindications of all the exploited, oppressed and discriminated of the earth its own, regardless of their ethnic or national origins and cultural characteristics. It’s not an essentialist or ethnic proposal. The proposal addresses all the peoples of Mexico, including the one of the majority nationality, that world where we all fit.
7. The initiative does not divide the partisan left; as Paulina Fernández points out, it places it on exhibit, and she would add, in all its racism and wretchedness.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Friday, June 30, 2017
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2017/06/30/opinion/017a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
The colonial State and revolution
Mural depicting indigenous women pushing soldiers away to keep them out of Xoyep after the Acteal Massacre.
By: Raúl Zibechi
A century has passed since Lenin would write one of the most important pieces of critical thought: The State and Revolution. The work was written in between the two revolutions of 1917, the one in February that ended czarism, and the one in October that brought the Soviets to power. It deals with the reconstruction of the thinking of Marx and Engels about the State, which was being diminished due to the hegemonic tendencies in the lefts of that time.
The principal ideas that emerge from the text are basically two. The State is “an organ of domination of one class,” and therefore it’s not appropriate to speak of a free or popular State. The revolution must destroy the bourgeois State and replace it with a proletarian State that, strictly speaking, is no longer a true State, since it has “demolished” the bureaucratic-military apparatus (bureaucracy and the regular army) and substituted elected and revocable public officials and the armament of the people, respectively.
This not-a-true-State begins a slow process of “extinction,” a question that Lenin picks up from Marx and updates. In a polemic with the anarchists, the Marxists maintained that the State such as we know it cannot be disappeared or extinguished; it can only be destroyed. But the non-State that substitutes for it, which no longer even has a permanent army or bureaucracy, can certainly start to disappear as an organ of power-over, in the measure that classes also tend to disappear.
The Paris Commune was in those years the favorite example. According to Lenin, in the commune “the organ of repression is the majority of the population and not a minority, as was always the case under slavery, servitude and salaried slavery.”
See the emphasis of those revolutionaries on destroying the heart of the state apparatus. We remember that Marx, in his account about the commune, maintained that: “the working class cannot simply take possession of the existing state apparatus and put it in motion for its own purposes.”
So far, this has been a very brief reconstruction of critical thought about the State. Going forward, we must consider that we’re talking about reflections on the European states, in the world’s most developed countries that were, at the same time, imperial nations.
In Latin America the construction of the nation-states was very different. We are faced with states that were created against and above the Indian, Black and Mestizo majorities, as organs of class repression (just like in Europe), but also and overlapping, as organs of the domination of one race over others. In sum, they were not only created to ensure the exploitation and extraction of surplus value, but also to consolidate race as the crux of domination.
In the better part of Latin American countries, the administrators of the nation-State (the civilian bureaucracies as well as the military) are white people that violently dispossess and oppress the Indian, Black and Mestizo majorities. This double axis, both classist and racist, of the states born with independence not only modify the analysis of Marx and Lenin, but rather puts them in a distinct position: state domination can only be exercised through race and class violence.
If they considered the State as a “parasite” adhered to society’s body, in Latin America it’s not only a parasite (a figure that transmits exploitation), but also a killing machine, as five centuries of history demonstrate, machinery that has unified the interests of a class that is, at the same time, economically and racially dominant.
Having reached this point, I would like to make some current considerations.
The first one is that the world’s reality changed in the previous century, but those changes have not modified the role of the State. Moreover, we can say that we live under a regime where the states are at the service of the Fourth World War against the peoples. In other words, the states wage war on the peoples; we are not faced with a deviation but rather a reality of a structural character.
The second is that, trying to destroy the state apparatus one can argue (with reason) that the popular sectors don’t have enough strength to do it, at least in the immense majority of the countries. Therefore, a good part of revolutions are the daughters of war, the time at which the states collapse and become extremely weak, as is happening in Syria. At those times, experiences emerge like that of the Kurds in Rojava.
Not having sufficient strength does not mean to say that it would be good to occupy the state apparatus without destroying its nuclei of civilian and military power. All the progressive governments (past, current and those that will come) have no other policy towards the armies than to keep them as they are, untouchable, because they don’t even dream of entering into conflict with them.
The problem is that these bureaucracies (but especially the military) cannot be transformed from inside or in a gradual way. It’s customary to say that the armed forces are subordinate to the civilian power. It’s not true; they have their own interests and command, even in the most “democratic” countries. In Uruguay, to give an example, the military has impeded as of now that the truth be known about the disappeared and about torture. The current president, Tabaré Vázquez, as well as the former president, José Mujica, subordinated themselves to the military.
It’s not very serious to seek arriving in the government without a clear policy towards the civilian and military bureaucracies. Most of the time, the electoral lefts elude the question, and hide their heads like an ostrich. Then they make a show of unlimited pragmatism.
Then, what do we do when there isn’t any strength to overthrow them?
The Kurds and the Zapatistas, also the Mapuche and the Nasa, opted for a different path: arming themselves as peoples, sometimes with firearms and at other times with symbolic arms like the staffs of command. It’s not a question of military technique, but rather of a willingness of spirit.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Friday, June 23, 2017
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2017/06/23/opinion/017a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
The Racist Contempt of the Wise
The Racist Contempt of the Wise
By Sergio Rodriguez Lascano
One of the most base characteristics in the theoretical thinking of the left locates the proposals, concepts, analysis, tendencies, and theories that come from below as folklore—produced by those who haven’t been formed in academia.
With a stroke of the pen or the keyboard, not only does this impoverish emancipatory theory but it flatly lies about the origins of such theory.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a Marxist, or anarchist, or revolutionary syndicalist or Blanquist. All of the diverse emancipatory theories were linked to a social process that made them not only possible, but inevitable. And so, for example, the League of the Banned—then the League of the Just, finally the Communist League–were composed of tailors, shoemakers, watchmakers. Those revolutionaries didn’t elaborate their theories in an academic context—more than that, often they did it under conditions of hunger or in prison–but among ordinary people with whom they worked and worked out ideas; and of course, in the midst of the great social confrontations: the revolution of 1830 in France, the revolution of 1848 in a great part of Europe, and of course the Paris Commune of 1871. That’s why Karl Marx coined a phrase that still today burns among many commentators about social struggles. “Every step of real movement is worth more than a dozen programs.” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_05_05.htm “Letter from K. Marx to W. Bracke,” London, May 5, 1875.)
All of this is relevant because a group of commentators on reality from social media (that is where their praxis is located) have joined the chorus of attacks against Zapatismo, especially against Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés. These commentators’ practical activity amounts to crossing the Eje Central in Mexico City in fear (not without asking someone for help because contact with the people provokes disgust). Their “argument” – which would be laughable if it weren’t so dishonest—consists in pointing out that he isn’t really anti-capitalist (with a good-natured tone, it’s very chic to suggest that he could be if only he were to study and understand the profound significance of the law of value and commodity fetishism).
One could ask “where do the people who make this critique locate themselves?” Or “what are the theoretical and practical bases from which they make it?” Of course it isn’t strange that they join the anti-Zapatista chorus, or that the fundamentals of their critique come along with a big dose of racist contempt. Many have lined up behind them. Octavio Rodriguez Araujo is at the front of the line with his cool version of “my passage through Zapatismo.”
The Zapatistas’ theoretical elaboration, at least that which they have made public, begins in 1994. They laid out a series of concepts and categories that, many years later, some famous writer took up, of course, without citing the origin of the proposal.
There are also those who, at the pinnacle of retrograde racism, proposed the idea that Zapatismo was fine for the jungle but not for the city [polis]. That the city [polis] is a complex society and not a simple one like indigenous society. The idea is very simple: Zapatismo shouldn’t mess with the intricacies of theoretical proposals, they should construct their caracoles, stay in the jungle and not weigh in on burning themes like neoliberalism, the market, finance capital, the crisis of the Nation-State, accumulation by dispossession, commodity fetishism (for anyone who wants a simple but profound explanation of what this last concepts means, I recommend the discourse of the deceased Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos in Altepexi, Puebla about maquila workers) etc. [http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2006/02/13/altepecxi-puebla-12feb06/ does not appear to have been translated into English]
But it turns out that Zapatismo not only has spoken about all those issues, but has constructed a method of approximation that, has at least two variants:
- As they have said: their theoretical reflection is a product of their practice.
- What they propose are not final judgments or closed theories, so beloved of those who fill their mouths speaking of science–those who don’t understand the important role that doubt has played historically in science. Of course, we are speaking of “scientific doubt” that calls into question revealed truths. For science, every truth, in order to be scientific, has to be refutable. An “indisputable” scientific truth is therefore an oxymoron. A characteristic of all of the theoretical elaboration of the companer@s is the “precautionary principle,” bound up with the following idea: “that’s how we see things, but who knows how you do?” They analyze economic, social, and political processes trying to locate the underlying trends that are expressed in them. And it has to be said: almost all of the trends identified by them have been demonstrated to be realities.
Why this precaution? I think there are three reasons:
- They are modest and their way of explaining things doesn’t involve the pedantry of desk theorists.
- They begin from an ethical principle that is profoundly alien not only to the theorists on social media, but also to the intellectuals in the academy who never or almost never take responsibility for what they write. One week they propose an idea, reality demonstrates the next day that their approach was completely mistaken, and they never reconsider their analysis to indicate explicitly the error or the horror, they just pass onto the next theme without the slightest embarrassment. By contrast, the Zapatistas’ word has value. When they write or say something, that something has been the product of a long process of reflection and not something that just occurred in the moment. And therefore they take responsibility for what they say. They don’t forget what they said, they have it present, they pursue the analysis of the historical trend they have identified—they see if others have other ideas, and then, via practice, they discover who was right. But, this doesn’t lead them to sing victory or to claim superiority. A new trend opens before their eyes and they begin the entire (practical-analytical) process again.
- Since their theoretical reflection is the product of their practice, they must be constantly measuring against reality those trends that they have inferred from new practices. They leave to others the confidence to disqualify a movement that said NO! Enough!–at a time when the end of history had been decreed, and a “new world order,” proclaimed; and when resignation had adorned itself with the cloak of cynicism.
Stupid things are said, like that Zapatismo is a “chic ethics” or that they aren’t completely anti-capitalist (despite the fact that this is how they define themselves) because they don’t understand the theory of value and commodity fetishism. Those who have said this last aren’t serious students of the works of Marx. They haven’t even read the fundamental works of Marxism, they only seek to be in “fashion” without knowing that, as Walter Benjamin said:
Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands.” (Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html)
They interpret Marx through the lenses of Robert Kurz (who died in 2012). On this occasion, I’m not interested in debating the thesis of Kurz which besides having some interesting things, reveals the terrible result of someone who spews contempt toward ordinary people, who live, grow and relate to the streets or to the land. Kurz never spoke with ordinary people nor looked to find common ground with them, he didn’t even try to understand them, or even really to see them. It strikes me that those little people who grab onto Kurz in order to critique the Zapatistas and “demonstrate” why they are not really anti-capitalists—or that they’re not yet, though maybe some day, if they listen to them (they don’t say this but it’s suggested), they will come to be anti-capitalists—overlooking something fundamental: What are the concrete expressions, the practices, of Zapatista anti-capitalism?
Let’s look in some detail at the problem.
In a series of memorable paragraphs, Subcomandante Galeano, in the name of the Zapatistas, in reference to the discourse of five different generations of Zapatista women, pointed out the following: [here is the source text in Spanish: http://radiozapatista.org/?p=13267 … there doesn’t appear to be English translation]:
“Zapatismo can’t be explained by itself, it needs concepts, theories and critical thinking to become aware of itself. You have all heard or read the marvelous genealogy of the struggle of Zapatista women, their heroism, their stubborn tenacity, but something is missing.
“Political Economy.
“This rebellion and resistance could grow, develop and extend itself to an extent that now surprises, and even frightens us, only when there existed the material base that made it concrete. It wasn’t until women began to detach themselves from economic dependence on men, that the passage from theory to reality happened. It wasn’t until their cooperatives emerged, their own projects, not until they appropriated the economy, did they take off. The tireless work of the Ramonas, the Susanas, and all the Zapatista women who dis-oriented [ok, that was a little macho slip], who inspired other women; and those, others still—all of this was possible and is possible because the women don’t depend economically on men.
“And let me tell you that this itself was possible only after at least two fundamental transformations: one, the change in ownership of the means of production; and the other, making and implementing their own decisions–that is, politics. To explain this, I’ve used the tools of political economy. Without those, you could think that all of this was a question of will, of resolve, commitment, militancy.
“The natural sciences recognize the principle of the excluded middle. (Actually, in reality it is written as the “Tercio Excluido” (the excluded third) but the “Tercios Compas” , well we’re Zapatistas and we resist. This principle is actually very simple: a thing can’t both be and not be. That is, in identical conditions, a premise will always have one and only one conclusion. [there is no third possibility] In the social sciences, the dizzying rhythm of change in the very conditions of our premises means that when the theorist arrives to reality very excited about what he has to offer [“loco de contento con su cargamento,” [Editor’s note, translates loosely as: crazy happy with his products], reality has already transformed itself.
“Unless he’s a cynic who only wants to preserve his grant or his job, the critical thinker would have to come and go continually from reality to theory, in such a way and with such speed that it’s not surprising that pretty soon he’d get nauseous and vomit. The social scientist doesn’t have to redo everything, as they would have it in social networks and the paid media. The social scientist doesn’t have to rediscover fire every time he wants to register the multiple conflagrations that are growing and spreading in social reality. He starts from a theoretical framework, some fundamental ideas, scientific concepts, a theoretical base.
“For example in the science of political economy, there is the theory of value or the theory that orients us to look for general explanations in material conditions. To begin from the ownership of the means of production, circulation and consumption of commodities (we have added “the means of dispossession,” for reasons we will explain), and the social relations of production that this mode of ownership imposes.
“Those theories, those concepts – are they only good intentions, notions, more or less structured ideologies?
“Do they serve to explain a reality? For example, can the genealogy of the capitalist system be explained without the concept of the commodity, without the theory of value? Or to put it more provocatively, can the birth and development of capitalism be explained adequately with concepts and theories that are contrary to and that contradict the theories and concepts of political economy ?” (Critical Thought confronts the Capitalist Hidra, Volume 1).
So, is there something lacking for them to qualify as anti-capitalist? Do they need to read Kurz? Ha!
In these paragraphs, from my point of view, at least four fundamental elements of the anti-capitalist practice and theory of the Zapatistas can be found. Whoever was able to hear the narratives of the five Zapatista compañeras was profoundly moved. What we heard was evidence of “the struggle to transit from sorrow to hope.” We heard of the transit from life under the domination of the landowners to the construction of new social relationships. But the narrative didn’t take form based in a closed, hard, boring discourse, but from the perspective of those who told, in a completely natural way, the story of their great and heroic creation.
And then the Sup, based on that practical experience, creates and recreates a series of key concepts:
a) This was possible, only due to a change in the ownership of the means of production.
But that change in ownership has happened many times in history; what’s different here is that we’re not dealing with a “state-ization” of the means of production, but with their socialization. And the difference is not trivial. The process of organization that has permitted the creation of new social relations has its material basis in the social appropriation of the means of production, especially the land.
Everything changes as a result. The laws of commerce are modified. The new owners of the means of production decide the form, the structure, the rhythms—everything that has to do with work, the product and the distribution of the social surplus happens based on social criteria.
Work stops being a social relationship imposed by private interests that determine the objectives and the rhythms of production and that appropriate unpaid labor time for their own personal benefit.
Equally, work ceases to be imposed by a state bureaucracy that determines the objectives and the rhythms of production, and that, even though it distributes a little less badly the products of unpaid labor time, it appropriates a fundamental part, leading to corruption and a process over the long term of the configuration of a bureaucratic bourgeoisie.
In both of these forms of control of the means of production mentioned above, the product of labor not only doesn’t belong to the direct producers, but is the basis of exploitation and domination.
But when the direct producers have control of the productive process because they are the owners of the means of production, then the key idea of the society that we are struggling for—“the free association of producers”—becomes reality.
b) But this fact isn’t only located in an economic relationship but in something equally profound: “the making and implementation of their own decisions.” For those obsessed with ontology, what is the difference here between subject and object? Can they be separated? Is it possible to construct an other social relationship if the appropriation of the means of production isn’t accompanied by “making and implementing their own decisions” on the part of the producers? Can they make and implement their own decisions without appropriating the means of production? Isn’t this the real basis of the concept of freedom? Isn’t this the material basis of the concept of dignity? Isn’t this the material basis s of the concept of democracy? Isn’t this antagonistic to the law of value and the fetishism of commodities?
c) And the law of value? And the fetishism of commodities? If the social relations of production change and if the community (not a boss, not the state, not the government, not a bureaucrat, not even a revolutionary) decides the form that the relations of production are going to take and if they are defined in terms of the collective interest and there is no private appropriation of the social surplus, then only someone who is completely obtuse who doesn’t have any point of view beyond that of a screen, whether large or small, can say “that isn’t anti-capitalism, but maybe some day it will be.”
If we understand that the fundamental basis of the law of value has to do with the appropriation and control of life via the appropriation of unpaid work, then the response is obvious. If we understand that the basis of the fetishism of commodities is the external, alien character that production has for the producer—which makes it possible that commodities take on life before stunned eyes and begin to dance–,then we understand why in the Zapatista communities, the people dance with excess, they all dance and celebrate their creation, not the reverse.
d) But neither do they have the idea that what they are constructing is a phalanstery that exists on the margin of capitalist social relations of production. Nor the caricature that Kurz makes when he says:
“In recent years this formula has been used more and more in the sense of being a cooperativist economic alternative, “to the side” of the social synthesis engineered by capital and that in some way it would gradually spread. This simply provides continuity to particularism, ‘colored’” postmodern. Certainly, the formation of a negative society (negative Vegesellschaftung) of capitalism can only be overcome in its entirety, or it will not be overcome” (“The era of capitalism has passed” http://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/la-era-del-capitalismo-pas-la-izquierda-y-la-dialectica-sujeto-objeto-del-fetichismo-moderno ).
The Zapatistas have taken as their flagship phrase “what’s missing is missing.” Their heroic constructions, carried out in the Zapatista zones are only a demonstration that society can be organized in another way.
That the objective can’t be confined to a territory, a region, a state, a country, a continent, a world… That it is indeed possible to construct other social relations. That it is a lie that the egoism of humanity will inevitably impede any common egalitarian, collective construction. That capitalism is totally overcome or it will not be overcome.
That five continents speak and that all listen. That humanity suspend a moment its silence, of shame, and anguish. That humanity speak. That humanity listen…
In their world, those who live in Power and kill for Power don’t fit within the human. There is no space for hope, no space for the future. Slavery or death is the alternative that that world offers to all other worlds. The world of money, the world of the others, governs from the stock market. Speculation is today the principle source of wealth and at the same time, the best demonstration of the atrophy of the human capacity to work. It is no longer necessary to work to produce wealth, now all that’s necessary is speculation. (Second Declaration of La Realidad For Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, August1996: http://www.afn.org/~iguana/archives/1997_02/19970209.html
No the idea isn’t to make six, seven caracoles, each operating in its own way, but what I think is at the base of the anti-capitalist thought of Zapatismo is that it is indispensable to confront the motherlodes of capitalism: private property in the means of production, and the domination that enables the society to survive or die without having control of its life. How is it to be achieved? The Zapatistas never say to others what they must know, do, and above all, discover. For that they have posed the key question on which real movement advances. Therefore, that step is indispensable to be able to generate (with a codified program or not) the bases of liberation.
That is a little more complicated that living with the pleasure of having a group of 8 whose mouths open wide with the face of “Oh, the scholar has spoken!” It’s an embarrassment. No, not everyone can do it. No, not everyone can be the subterranean drone named Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés, but at least we should temper our judgements. But, in the end, each one with their flock.
A different idea can only take off from something that is profoundly unknown by this type of person. In order to arrive at that complex vision of political economy and of life, the Zapatistas leave us a footprint through which we can advance; obviously, it isn’t simple, but it is a path:
It is necessary to re-educate desire. To teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire in a different way. (Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos. Desde las montañas del sureste mexicano, Agosto de 1996).
There are 137 characters, three less than his universe. I don’t know, it could be, that in one of those, you will understand.
Translation by the Solidarity Committee with Chiapas, East Coast
Source: Sergio Rodriguez Lascano El desprecio racista de los “sabios” disponible en http://vientosur.info/spip.php?article12701
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