Zapatismo as a Resonant Public Pedagogy

Neoliberalism and Zapatismo as Public Pedagogies

While pedagogy can be considered the art, science, and philosophy of education, public pedagogy is a kind of education beyond formal schooling (Kelly, 2011).The term “public pedagogy” has different historical uses dating back to at least 1894 and is referenced in a growing body of academic literature (Sandlin, O’Malley, and Burdick, 2011). Sandlin and colleagues (2011: 339) conducted a meta-review of the literature on the subject and identified neoliberalism as an oft-cited hegemonic form of public pedagogy. Although the term suggests a revival of modernist liberal ideals, in rhetorically equating “free markets” with human freedom neoliberal policies deviate from classical liberalism. Market discipline is meted out disproportionately in part because of the “fading of meaningful democratic processes as decision making is vested in private institutions and the quasi-governmental structures that are coalescing around them” (Chomsky, 1999: 127).

With the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s, publicly funded research and development drove an exponential increase in information and communications technologies. While benefiting from these new technologies, the highly concentrated communications and financial industries used securitized instruments for speculation and later relied on trillions of dollars in direct public subsidy in the wake of the 2007–2009 global financial crisis and bank bailouts (Harvey, 2011; Schiller, 1999). Yet neoliberalism is also a public pedagogy whereby popular institutions (e.g., mass media, schools) support a way of thinking that reduces human relationships to exchange. It educates people to see themselves as individual actors tasked with maximizing self-interest through markets (Giroux, 2004). As a deeper subordination to the logics of capitalism, neoliberalism has prioritized capital’s self-valorization process, the constant creation of alienated and objectified labor by privileging market mechanisms, abstract labor, and difference-denying exchange over organization and collective decision making. The Zapatistas challenged neoliberal pedagogy not just through eloquent poetics or combat alone but by putting into practice different ways of doing that, through contrast, illustrate the un-freedom of capitalism while prefiguring alternatives.

As a pedagogy, Zapatismo is not, as has been argued (Wolfson, 2012), a Marxist-Leninist doctrine, although its initial hybridized philosophy had its roots in people-focused (rather than party-oriented) Maoism, among other influences (Dellacioppa, 2009). It is also not a “clear political line, based first and foremost in the interest of the peasants of southern Mexico,” as Wolfson (2012:163) argues. Nor is it limited to the autonomous zones of Chiapas. Rather, it is an adaptable transnational praxis that problematizes global capitalism and vertical power relations. Marcos and the indigenous Mayans in southeastern Mexico have been teachers in the mode of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, the seminal theorist of critical pedagogy. Similar to Freirean praxis, Zapatista pedagogy has stressed dialogue between teachers and students (with roles frequently being reversed), problematizing the present situation, using new network technology to facilitate learning and questioning, stressing doing and reflecting, maintaining autonomy from power centers like the state, market-based politics, and capitalist modes of production, and continuous efforts toward horizontality (direct democracy). As a pedagogy of this kind it resonates far beyond the regional centers for political-cultural construction known as caracoles. New media and network technologies have facilitated Zapatismo, but its resonance does not depend upon them.

By contesting the dominant neoliberal paradigm, the communication praxis of the Zapatistas exemplifies a public pedagogy of problematization. U.S. media and financial institutions continue to extract surplus value from the Latin American nations (Higginbottom, 2013) by exploiting digital technologies to augment capital circulation and accumulation. Neoliberal policies precipitated the 1994 uprisings, as with the structural adjustment programs dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that opened Mexico up to further privatization and greater foreign investment in exchange for funds following the 1982 debt crisis (Lustig, 1995). The Zapatistas were trailblazers of the alter-globalization, or global justice, movement that challenged neoliberal measures intended to free up capital—but not people—to transverse borders. Zapatismo, “a new political praxis” or “revolution of revolutions” (Wolfson, 2012: 161), has catalyzed a multitude of movements, including the Argentine piqueteros (Movimimento de Trabajadores Desocupados [Unemployed Workers’ Movement— MTD]), the Independent Media Center (IMC) network, and Occupy Wall Street.

Wolfson (2012: 156) contends that Zapatismo “emerged dialectically, through a series of confrontations, and was/is a fluid response to material conditions of struggle in Mexico,” but this plays down resistance to the rule of money and markets beyond Chiapas. The EZLN articulated that resistance, reminding the world that anticapitalist social organization is possible. It sparked shared understandings of the anticapitalist struggle of the Other as one’s own and invited people across the globe to share in stories of resistance that overflow both the borders of Mexico and “the bounds of solidarity to yield new and unanticipated results” (Khasnabish, 2008: 30). But this overflowing resists reduction to any “rhizomatic nature” (29). ¹ The rhizome, a philosophical concept applied in the absence of dialectics, differs from hierarchical systems with centralized nodes of determination that transmit information in a one-way path (Deleuze and Guattari, 2007 [1987]: 16–17). The resonant qualities do appear rhizomatic, but this is because Zapatismo promotes critical consciousness of neoliberalism’s negation of humanity on a global scale. At best, calling Zapatismo a rhizome is a tautology, attempting to explain the resonance with a description of the phenomenon itself but one without any reflection of the antagonistic character of society. Conceptualizing Zapatismo as a rhizome denies the essential negation that capital imposes and elides the related praxis that creates “cracks” (Holloway, 2010) in the system.

The rhizome, also referred to as the “production of the unconscious” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2007 [1987]: 18), ² cannot account for the resonance of Zapatismo as an expression of the problem-posing process of consciousness raising. Conceptualizing Zapatismo as rhizomatic fails to account for the ways subjects can learn to think, live, and act against and beyond the narrow classifications and limited subjectivities promoted by neoliberal public pedagogy. It does not do justice to the deepening awareness or critical consciousness that indigenous people in Chiapas and many others elsewhere achieve through reflection on their refusal to submit to unjustified authority or to human doing determined by labor power turned against labor. The resistance comes from negative subjects living in an antagonistic world obscured by Deleuzian concepts. Nail (2012) highlights the Zapatistas’ juntas de buen gobierno (good government councils), the frameworks for collective and autonomous decision making in Zapatista caracoles, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari to “argue that prefigurative revolutions are thus those types of transformation that are able to sustain the maximal creation of a new present as the expression of the past and future of their situation and connect it up to other struggles happening elsewhere” (31). The emphasis on prefigurative politics is apt, and the claim that Zapatismo “has no existence outside of the concrete practices that effectuate and mutually transform it” (140) is true enough, but the Deleuzian approach plays down the educative aspects of humans’ undergoing transformation. Nail’s application of the “constructivist theory of revolution” (30), drawn from Deleuze, further separates the functions of philosophy from politics (27), an operation akin to the separation of theory from practice that is antithetical to authentic pedagogy. It foregrounds the “creation of a new collective political body” (183), overlooking the pedagogy of negation and consciousness.

The Pedagogical Role of Intellectuals: Media and Praxis

Far from conventional “institution-building” (Wolfson, 2012: 156), which can calcify into rigid doctrine, the project of Zapatismo is problematization and prefiguration. A “politics of listening sits uneasily with any form of institutionalisation,” because striations of “antagonism (class struggle, if you will) move faster than any institution and any attempt to institutionalise them or tie them down” (Holloway, 2010: 77). Institutionalization, in this view, is like the “banking” mode of education that Freire (2000 [1970]) decried as treating people as deposit boxes designed for the passive reception of knowledge. Antithetical to institutionalization and avowing interconnectedness, Zapatismo proclaims “Para todos todo, para nosotros nada” (Everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves). The worldview calls for reflection: “You can see we are the rebellious mirror that wants to be a pane of glass and break” (Marcos, 2001: 104).

Moreover, Zapatista discourse has problematized the complicity of academia and the major media—the institutions of intellectual culture—in maintaining injustice. Comparing professional academics to guards, police, and jails, Marcos (2007: 340–341) railed against “the intellectuals above, who say what is science and what is not, what is serious and what is not, what is debate and what is not, what is true and what is false. . . . Capitalism doesn’t just recruit its intellectuals in the academy and in the culture; it also ‘manufactures’ their sounding boxes and assigns them territories.” There are also “intellectuals in the middle” who propound an ideology of objectivity, in denial about their affluent subjectivities and unreflective about their roles in determining the celebrated middle ground. These intellectuals set narrow limits for mass-media debate. Neoliberalism as public pedagogy cannot pose a problem outside those thought parameters. The authority of the state and the inevitability of capitalism are naturalized while critical evaluation of those presuppositions can become incomprehensible if not for the partial successes of other pedagogical projects.

Mexico’s ruling party between 1929 and the 1994 Zapatista revolt, the PRI, maintained a stranglehold on the mass media through corporate alliances and business deals. It still allowed for “some seemingly oppositional material,” which created “an illusion of free media,” but it “prohibited media from covering particular topics, such as government corruption, fraud, or any serious challenge to the system” (Armoudian, 2011: 201). Select newspapers such as La Jornada and Proceso distributed EZLN statements and sympathized with the Zapatista cause, especially given the government’s disregard for civilian casualties (Armoudian, 2011). Reports from newspapers like these made up about two-thirds of the content delivered electronically by the two major Zapatista listservs two years after the 1994 rebellion (Schulz, 2007: 17).

Coinciding with the 1994 rupture, information and communications technology developments allowed the revolutionaries to issue open communiqués and interact with other movements without having to rely upon—while still influencing—the big media entities. Even the PRI-friendly Televisa network reported some of “the indigenous side of the story,” in part because of the “sophisticated communication campaign” (Armoudian, 2011: 212) carried out by the Zapatistas. “Transnational Zapatismo” (Tarrow and McAdam, 2005: 141) spread across the web. Chiapas-l operated out of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City (Cleaver, 1998: 628). The University of Texas at Austin economics professor Harry Cleaver ³ created the Chiapas-95 e-mail listserv, which was later maintained by the solidarity group Acción Zapatista. The site became fully operational in February of 1995, providing an e-platform for discussion early on before becoming more of a means of information dissemination toward the end of its 12-year existence (Cleaver, 1998; Johnston and Laxer, 2003; Schulz, 2007). The Burn! Collective at the University of California at San Diego entrenched the war of attrition waged on the digital terrain with its Chiapas-L e-mailing list until it was shut down by a university administration upset over the collective’s circulation of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia communiqués (Schulz, 2007: 15–16).

New media enlarged the Zapatista “transcultural activist network,” deepened the process that started in 1994, and made the cultural politics of the Other Campaign possible after the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, a project that supported struggles among the disenfranchised across borders and shifted “the political culture of not only Mexico but the United States too” (Zugman, 2008: 354). To claim, however, that “the very existence of the Zapatistas depended on this web of interlocking, autonomously controlled and operated media” (Downing, 2001: 219) attributes too much agency to technology. Scholars have discussed the Zapatistas’ adept use of communications systems without closely examining the movement or attending to the praxis of others that also expressed Zapatismo. Were attention given to Zapatista communiqués, scholars would have to reckon with frequent problem posing rather than polemic. For example, Marcos (2013) challenged new-media misconceptions:

What about the satellite telephone that the Sup used to communicate with “international terrorism?” It was a walkie-talkie with a reach of some 400 meters, max, on flat land (there are probably still photos floating around out there of the “cyber guerrilla” ha!). And you think we had internet? In February of 1995, when the federal government was pursuing us (and not exactly for an interview), the portable PC was thrown into the first stream that we crossed. After that we wrote our communiqués on a mechanical typewriter lent to us by the ejidal commissioner of one of the communities that took us in.

Tongue-in-cheek, he added, “This was the powerful and advanced technology that we had, the ‘cyber guerrillas of the 21st Century,’” offering apologies if “this destroys some of the illusions that were created out there” (Marcos, 2013). The EZLN initially “played no direct role in the proliferation of the use of the Internet,” and the indigenous people in Chiapas maintained a “mediated relationship” (Cleaver, 1998: 628) to the new medium. By overemphasizing the role of new media and succumbing to a techno-fetish that erases the social relations underlying any public pedagogy, scholars reinforce the very categories against which the rebels and all those who resist are fighting.

Electronic media have created liminal spaces for consciousness raising, however, even as terrestrial TV in Mexico remains a duopoly (Azteca and Televisa) (MarketLine, 2013: 15). Video imagery of the Zapatista’s silent march on December 21, 2012, the day the Mayan calendar ended, conveyed the message online that the history of cracking capitalism was not over (Oikonomakis, 2012). Meanwhile, Mexico’s media industry was expected to grow by 2.7 percent between 2008 and 2012 while integrating and converging with network communication platforms (MarketLine, 2013: 7). Constant growth with even greater rates of return on capitalist investments continued, pushing private control of communications in Mexico farther in the direction of crisis.

The process continues as the hegemonic status of the neighbor to the north declines (Wallerstein, 2003), even though the U.S. media exerted a preponderant influence in the past with regard to Zapatista praxis. During the 1994 uprising, Zapatista networks achieved a ceasefire with the Mexican government because the latter feared bad publicity in the United States that could have undercut foreign investment and nascent trade deals (Martínez-Torres, 2001: 348). With greater realization of a proper world capitalist system the “distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged in the imperial global rainbow” (Hardt and Negri, 2000: xiii). Because of these developments, Hardt and Negri (2004: 85) recast their prior assertion that the Zapatista movement lacked communicability, ⁴ calling it instead “the hinge” between old forms of revolutionary struggle “and the new model of biopolitical network struggles. . . . Communication is central to the Zapatista’s notion of revolution, and they continually emphasize the need to create horizontal network organizations rather than vertical centralized structures.” More than mere emphasis, nonhierarchical decision making in the face of neoliberal power is what makes Zapatismo a public pedagogy and praxis of acting and educating differently.

Neo-Zapatista Networking and Zapatismo’s Dialectical Antimethod

President Salinas nullified Article 27 of the Mexican constitution in 1992, enabling “ejido—communally held—lands to be bought and sold on the national and international market” (Shenker, 2012: 432). This prompted the Zapatistas’ call for an independent media network that would function “not only as a tool for our social movements but for our lives” to save and share “history so it will not disappear” (Marcos, 2001: 181). The movement fused activist connections through the World Wide Web in unprecedented ways. Curiously, though, Wolfson (2012: 163) suggests that “the political praxis of the EZLN most closely resembles Lenin’s notion of dialectical politics.” According to this mode of dialectics, change occurs through contradiction, with the development of a unity of opposites in which an apparent whole divides into mutually exclusive parts, driving social transformation. However, there is no predetermined path; indeed, preguntar caminando (questioning while walking) and “We walk slowly, since we are going far” are Zapatista aphorisms implying an openness of history from which new relations can be asserted through collective inquiry into both the movement and the system that encompasses it. It is thus questionable whether it is a “process that comes from a clear political line . . . based first and foremost in the interests of the peasants of southern Mexico” (Wolfson, 2012: 162).

Similarly, it is doubtful that “theories of networked organizational structure and direct democratic governance” that were considered a “conditional necessity in Chiapas” became “rigid virtues” and “abstracted universal values in social movements such as indymedia” (Wolfson, 2012: 164–165). Rather than resulting in rigidity, the resistance-as-interrogation aspect of collective decision making enables adaptive praxis, which is why the prefigurative politics of the Zapatistas resonated with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the IMC before it. When the Urbana-Champaign IMC posted a job opening on its listserv, “the subject of paying activists for work became a serious controversy” (Wolfson, 2012: 152), and “indymedia activists were looking to the EZLN to find or justify a set of ideologically pure laws regarding what it means to be a part of the indymedia movement” (153). But the IMC deliberation was less a “process of establishing orthodoxy” (153) than thoughtful consensus building. Money makes qualitatively different elements subject to indifferent exchange. The spread of the exchange principle “imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to become total” (Adorno, 1966: 146). As the medium for exchange, money obscures the social relations enabling its use and allows for private accumulation of social power. These are pressing concerns. Recently, Marcos said that the paid press would not be allowed at the twentieth-anniversary celebration of the Zapatistas’ rebellion (Iaconangelo, 2013). Remuneration within a wage system might be the best way to address exploitation in certain situations, however, enabling the inclusion of those who would otherwise not be able to participate for lack of funds. The IMC’s in-person and online discussions about money exemplify Zapatismo as participatory questioning and decision making—a problematized worldview.

The “clear political line” is actually flexible and reflexive for the Zapatistas and the many movements through which Zapatismo resonates. The Spanish-speaking guerrillas who joined the indigenous in Chiapas carried with them a Marxist-Leninist ideology, but Zapatismo evolved to reflect Mayan values (Wolfson, 2012: 158–159). It also inherited histories that came to the fore during the “world revolution” of 1968 such as the “soft Maoism” and liberation theology, with associated ideas for indigenous autonomy generated at the Indian Congress held in Chiapas in 1974 to address the hegemonic spread of evangelical Protestantism (Dellacioppa, 2009: 7–9). Hybridity and appreciation of difference have remained key, but what resonates also is the critical disposition toward a neoliberal world—a world that confines agency to market choices and reduces politics to the election of candidates to govern over and for others.

The First Intercontinental Conference for Humanity against Neoliberalism in 1996 highlighted Zapatismo as a critical public pedagogy. The Zapatistas invited activists and ordinary people from outside Mexico to see how people were being dehumanized by “the powers that be, known internationally by the term ‘neoliberalism’” (Marcos, 2001: 101). They welcomed people from across five continents to the Mexican Southeast to join “the search for life and struggle against death” (106): “We invited you for all of us to hear ourselves and speak to ourselves. To see all that we are” (103–104). To be sure, the EZLN was “almost entirely indigenous people from Chiapas,” but, as Marcos (261) explained,

We did not want to struggle just for our own good, or just for the good of the indigenous of Chiapas, or just for the good of the Indian peoples of Mexico. We wanted to fight along with everyone who was humble and simple like ourselves, who was in great need, and who suffered from exploitation and thievery by the rich and their bad governments, here in our Mexico and in other countries around the world.

Thus, while neoliberal pedagogy legitimates capital’s transborder flows, neo-Zapatista networks are “undermining the distinction between domestic and foreign policy—and challenging the constitution of the nation state” (Cleaver, 1998: 622).

Zapatismo resonated with the Indymedia movement not because IMC activists reified values handed down from Chiapas but because of the shared struggle to problematize domination and prefigure relations for realizing global justice. The Indymedia movement started after the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and attracted much of the global justice movement, which, like the Zapatistas, benefited from radical media projects autonomous from conglomerates and the state. Big Noise Films, the media organization committed to sharing stories of resistance through documentary film, produced the 2000 film This Is What Democracy Looks Like about the street protests in Seattle a year after releasing Zapatista. Those involved in the global justice movement used direct democracy in planning the 1999 protests with the aim of prefiguring possible forms of decision making among activists from different places focused on some of the same objectives (Smaligo, 2014). Those protests spurred the development of the IMC network, which was set up in Seattle to connect activists and counter the mainstream narratives about what the alter-globalization demonstrations were trying to do. IMCs cropped up across the globe, with virtual online spaces to parallel their physical spaces in different cities. The centers’ online spaces were connected through the Indymedia network platform. The spaces expressed Zapatismo pedagogically, through “remediation”: borrowing, adapting, sampling, or remixing existing media content to create new expressions and relationships that resist fixed technological or institutional structures (Lievrouw, 2009: 561). With the IMC, counternarratives mirroring its counterinstitutional form “remediated” the praxis of Zapatismo with new media framing (e.g., offering accurate explanations of anarcho-socialist praxis that contested dominant-media distortions) and critical appraisal of neoliberalism (e.g., assailing IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs that provided loans to countries on the condition that they cut social provisions). Nonhierarchic arrangements enabled anyone to post that content to the site. What preceded the IMC and the battle in Seattle, however, was the following (Martínez-Torres, 2001: 352):

The Zapatista structure is a non-hierarchical network, a horizontal organization with a hybrid identity, hidden behind masks. On the Internet, which is non-hierarchical and horizontal in structure, instead of masks we find usernames—pseudonyms that represent people, many of whom may be marginalized socially when off-line. The Zapatista movement has a strong appeal to the most marginalized elements in Mexican society, including the indigenous and the poor, but also activists, rockers, punks, students, gays, and so forth.

The ability to use Internet technology anonymously in certain settings, to wear a cyber-mask or balaclava like those that members of the EZLN use to cover their faces so that they will truly be seen, permits the partial concealing of identity or status. It may help allay the insecurities and anxieties that are pervasive in the age of precarious labor and mass surveillance, although privacy and anonymity may be illusory in the light of that surveillance.

New technologies and platforms developed after the Zapatistas’ 1994 uprising were coeval with increased electronic monitoring and commercialization. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security monitored Occupy Wall Street’s uses of social media (Department of Homeland Security, 2011). While the point of reference in Occupy was horizontal among those below, it explicitly targeted Wall Street for representing unjust and unbridled finance capitalism. But Wall Street had already targeted the Zapatistas more than a decade earlier. The academic and one-time Chase Manhattan consultant Riordan Roett authorized a memo on investment opportunities in Mexico released in early 1995 “calling for the Zedillo government to restore investor confidence by ‘eliminating the Zapatistas’” (cited in Cleaver, 1998: 626). A study conducted by the RAND Corporation, funded by the U.S. Army and sponsored by the deputy chief of staff of intelligence, also examined the implications of the “social netwar” being carried out by the Zapatistas (Ronfeldt et al., 1998).

The spread of social media platforms since the January 1994 rebellion has complicated the cyber dimension of the political terrain for pedagogy and imagination. Occupy Wall Street cautiously utilized Facebook as a mobilizing platform (OWS Analytics, 2012) because the site was visited by far more people than visited noncommercial alternative networks such as the increasingly outmoded IMC sites. Facebook provides consumer preference data, extracted from users, to advertisers and generated about US$7 billion in advertising revenue in 2013, US$2.78 billion more than in 2012 (Facebook, 2013). The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) targeted ethnic minorities (e.g., Muslim Americans), activists, and others—often through the use of social media like Facebook—and shared that information with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency (Gallagher and Greenwald, 2014; Greenwald and Hussain, 2014). Complete anonymity online has become impossible. What anonymity exists has arguably enabled more disinhibited ad hominem attacks than dialogue, as is evidenced by a cursory glance at message board posts or the comments section on YouTube. Coupled with government initiatives like the U.S. Agency for International Development, which have systematically tried to subvert Latin American nations through social media (Butler, Gillum, and Arce, 2014), and the NSA’s explicit targeting of political leaders in the region such as Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff (Boadle, 2013), counterrevolutionary actions and control online emerge as new phenomena with negative implications for the practice of direct democracy on the Internet.

However, hidden identities online undermine self-aggrandizing celebrity culture and undercut the neoliberal presentation of the individual as opposed to society by signifying shared struggle. Paradoxically, concealing their identities in these ways can allow the most marginalized to be more authentically themselves. Given the difficulties inherent in accomplishing those aims online in a world of mass surveillance and for-profit tracking for commercial revenue, alternative media praxis such as that of the IMC movement and the contesting of capital and the state through alternative practices in the physical world take on added importance. Communities in Chiapas provide concrete examples that activists from outside can learn from without needing to imitate. What resonates is a new kind of “identity politics” based not on acceptance of identities set within the given system or on a celebration of diverse nodes linked up like a rhizome but on going against and beyond capital’s definitions without the dialectical synthesis inherent in party politics or a notion of taking power.

From the start, Zapatismo differed from the Leninist notion of power capture. Wolfson (2012: 162) argues that “the essential elements of Zapatismo are not democracy, autonomy, communications, or networks, which are the principal vectors through which the EZLN was interpreted by scholars and activists.” Undeniably, though, the movement supported “autonomy within, not against, Mexican society” (Cleaver, 1998: 626)—a society that it seeks to democratize in a real rather than liberal-electoral way. Arguably, Leninist dialectics implies “a positive political project rooted in institution-building, class-based revolution, and the material conditions of oppression” (Wolfson, 2012: 156). Yet “transnational Zapatismo, in contrast, has increasingly moved away from relations with the state as a focus of its politics,” concentrating instead “on grassroots democracy and participation” through procedural consensus and a “politics of listening” (Dellacioppa, 2011: 127). Interactive media that coevolved with the Zapatista movement enhanced the possibilities of this public pedagogy. Convergent platforms and peer-to-peer technology afford continuing dialogue among Zapatistas in Chiapas and neo-Zapatistas elsewhere. The process is dialogic and dialectical in that neither the EZLN nor any facet of the Zapatistas functions as a vanguard ⁵ or authoritarian teacher. Rather, as in problem-posing Freirean critical pedagogy, the roles of teacher and student are flexible, interchangeable, contextualized, oriented to perpetual dialogue, and geared for inclusive decision making. Referring to Zapatismo as an “intuition,” an intuiting of the negativity of the neoliberal world made conscious through questioning, Marcos (2001: 440) explained that “Zapatismo poses the question: ‘What is it that has excluded me?’ ‘What is it that has isolated me?’” Praxis “simply states the question and stipulates that the response is plural, that the response is inclusive.” In this way, the public pedagogy of the Zapatistas reflects what Freire once said about his own pedagogical (anti-)method: “I don’t want to be exported. It is impossible to export pedagogical practices without reinventing them. Please, tell your fellow American educators not to import me. Ask them to recreate and rewrite my ideas” (quoted in Macedo, 1997: 3).

The Pedagogical Resonance of Real Democracy

During the early years of the new millennium, the “cyber left” generated excitement among critics who were dismayed by the success of the neoliberal agenda. According to Wolfson (2012: 164), “Much of this enthusiasm has diminished. . . . Many of the movements of this new period of protest have shut their doors and the Global Social Justice Movement generally has faltered” because it “did not allow for adaptive, dynamic institutions that can effectively make long-term change.” Yet global uprisings throughout 2010–2012, including Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots, suggests a continued resonance, raising the question “What is this resonance? Is it an imagined or real resonance?” (Holloway, 2005: 169). Resistance to neoliberalism resonates, but it entails more than brute force or a simple somatic repudiation of the alienation and indifference produced by ubiquitous commodification.

In challenging previous political approaches, Zapatismo illustrates an adaptation of Freirean critical pedagogy. Freire (1998) advocated a pedagogy of problematization, using “the critical faculty” as part of a praxis with a “democratic vision” insisting on the “autonomy of the learner” to co-construct meaning. The Zapatistas’ stress on asking questions while walking comports with a movement for consciousness raising. It entails criticism of the historical situation, reflecting and acting differently to create different conditions. Zapatismo resonates because the disavowal of capital and the rejection of dehumanizing relations are communicated not just through armed resistance—although that has been necessary in the Zapatista struggle for life over death—but through prose disseminated by solidarity networks, new meaning-making, and the recovery of real democracy.

Zapatismo avoids a “clear political line,” while “democratic governance” that is as direct as possible appears key. This is evident in the Zapatista’s “innovative politics,” which include resisting government social programs and mandar obedeciendo (ruling by obeying), a guide for new relationships between leaders and society involving accountability and horizontal decision making (Swords, 2007: 80). They put the principle into practice during the negotiations with the Mexican state after the 1994 uprising, when Zapatista delegates would interrupt the talks to return to the villages when new questions arose (Lynd and Grubacic, 2008: 5–6). They called for democratic governance in the First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (Shenker, 2012) and stated: “We are fighting for democracy, liberty, and justice for those who have been denied it” (Marcos, 2007: 284). Accordingly, they used new media to invite “honest sectors of civil society to attend a National Dialogue for Democracy, Freedom, and Justice” (Marcos, 2001: 45). They consulted their indigenous bases “in a democratic exercise without precedent in an armed organization,” and those bases, “seeing that the central demands of democracy, freedom, and justice have yet to be resolved, decided against signing the government’s proposal” (Marcos, 2001: 47). The Zapatistas signed the San Andrés Accords in 1996, an agreement that the Mexican government would go on to violate. Yet the negotiations provided methods to legitimate, develop, and expand “structures of local-level democracy [because] Zapatista negotiators (who were selected as recallable delegates by their communities) insisted that every stage of negotiations was subject to comprehensive democratic consultation, approval, and review” (Graeber, 2013: 264). When the government failed to uphold the accords, they left the negotiations.

The EZLN scaled back military control as a way of strengthening the autonomous Zapatista municipalities, the method of autonomous government that “comes from several centuries of indigenous resistance and from the Zapatistas’ own experience” (Marcos, 2007: 265). Then as now, the pedagogy producing much of the resonance of Zapatismo has to do with the recovery of traditions to inform political activity. The Zapatistas use traditional indigenous cargo systems that mix religious and civil authorities in rotating positions of leadership in a hierarchy predicated on responsibility (Dellacioppa, 2009: 94–95). These systems facilitate the community assemblies in which decisions are generally made through consensus and politics is lived and opposed to power-over. Community assemblies involving 50–200 people regularly convene to discuss and decide on local matters through organic deliberation, aided by a facilitator, that ends only when participants answer the question “¿Acuerdo ya?” (Do we have agreement?) in the affirmative (Starr, Martinez-Torres, and Rosset, 2011: 105). Assemblies at the community level elect delegates to municipal and regional assemblies and to the Zapatista government. After the Zapatistas problematized their own authority, “separating the political-military from the autonomous and democratic aspects of organization” (Marcos, 2007: 266) in their communities, they passed decision-making power on to the villages. Five autonomous regions in Chiapas formed good government councils (Shenker, 2012: 434) in 2003, and through them they continue the “self-education and exercise of ‘governing by obeying’” (Marcos, 2007: 266).

Likewise, the Zapatistas’ pedagogy that spread across the world through digital networks implies a degree of democratic collectivity. Its appreciation for the dignity of the individual, combined with an understanding that the individual thrives only in relation to the collective, challenges the either-or dichotomy of individual vs. collective freedom, just as the distinction between who is and who is not a Zapatista evaporates in the “passage from the virtual through the possible to the real” (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 357). If “the virtual and the possible are wedded as irreducible innovation and as a revolutionary machine” (369), differential hierarchies are eliminated and differences are elevated in the communicative ether.

Democratic pedagogy continues apace in rebel territories, local and global, physical and virtual. Autonomous schools in the Morelia region of Chiapas teach the local Tojolabal language and protect indigenous values through an “alternative dynamic . . . of student-teacher roles: a focus on participation in lessons with an ‘education promoter’ rather than the passive absorption of information from an authoritative ‘teacher’” (Shenker, 2012: 436). An education promoter (average age 20) chosen by the local autonomous Zapatista communities often adopts a Freirean pedagogical approach, enabling students to rear-ticulate their ethnic and cultural traditions in the light of 500 years of struggle and changing socioeconomic conditions (Baronnet, 2008: 116). Education promoters encourage in-class discussion of land and economic issues. Class divisions are discussed through lessons on Mayan-Mesoamerican ancestry, the Spanish conquest, Mayan resistance, and figures in the Mexican Revolution and questions such as “How did our ancestors live?” and “What is neoliberalism?” (Shenker, 2012). This critical approach, wherein power is never self-justifying, cooccurs with recovery of a culture of collective self-organization. This is the prefigurative political character of the resistance, and many outside of Chiapas recognize it as their praxis too.

Offshoots of Occupy Wall Street continue to practice a pedagogy reflecting the resonance of Zapatismo. Occupy started with the occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York City on September 17, 2011, which inspired occupations across the United States and the world before the state (in a move all too familiar to Zapatistas) forcefully evicted encampments that November (Smaligo, 2014). Those involved, who eschewed state-directed electoral politics and instead practiced a prefigurative politics of consensus-based decision making in general assemblies, went on to create other resistance initiatives. An Occupy offshoot, OWS Zapatista, demonstrated the continuation of pedagogy when it sent e-mail blasts about a forum in July 2014 that was made available via livestream video online and used Zapatismo to critique NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP was a proposed regional trade agreement being negotiated largely in secret, but some chapters had been leaked and published by WikiLeaks (2014), giving activists insight into the new neoliberal plan. Students at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, became the first to hold assemblies against debt on a college campus (Strike Debt Carbondale, 2014) ⁶ under the banner of Strike Debt, another Occupy offshoot that evolved into a movement of debt resisters struggling for economic justice. Much as the Zapatistas have used parables and myths to critique the present, those affiliated with Strike Debt Carbondale organized an event for the campus, inviting those saddled with debt, mostly from student loans, to come and tell their stories.

Other Occupy offshoots, including OWS Zapatista, extended invitations to la escuelita de la libertad (little freedom school) held in Chiapas in August 2013 and again in December 2013 and January 2014. One EZLN member described the freedom school as being “about freedom and the construction of a new world different from that of the neoliberal capitalists” (Moisés, 2014). Lessons from it were said to “cross oceans, borders, and skies to reach you, compañeras, compañeros” (Moisés, 2014). More than 1,500 activists from all over the globe came to Chiapas for the first. Occupy Wall Street e-mails reported on the main themes for each day of the school, including the women’s Zapatista movement, modes of resistance (words, thinking, and hearts as “weapons”), the Zapatista’s “other justice,” and the “Other Democracy” that differs from state-centered electoral politics and celebrity candidates. The recovery of democracy was both in practice and in the language: “Democracy is at any moment, at every level of our life.”

One writer who participated in Occupy Wall Street in New York and who edited a “people-powered” news and analysis web site known for featuring articles on the Zapatistas and for covering Occupy since its inception, made the trip to Oventic and on to the Universidad de la Tierra in San Cristóbal de Las Casas in December 2013 for the Zapatista freedom school teach-in (Gottesdeiner, 2014). “Writing is another way to prevent an idea and a movement from disappearing,” she wrote. Recovering history to enliven the present—abandoning the historiography that would posit past events as inevitably leading to and justifying the existing order—has been integral to Zapatismo (Marcos, 2001). Even someone who grew up in a “well-heeled suburban community” (Gottesdeiner, 2014) and shares experiences after visiting a place where “the people order and the government obeys” can become part of a movement that contests the conditions that created her wealth amidst others’ privation.

Like the larger pedagogical project, the recovery extends beyond any individual, movement, or organization. Rather than being “rhizomatic,” this “resonance of resistance” (Oikonomakis and Roos, 2013) refers to shared struggles for recovering (and learning) real democracy, movement beyond the definitions of democracy that are dominant and compatible with capital. For example, Autonomedia, the autonomous publisher of radical texts, also published a collection of essays from the Midnight Notes Collective ⁷ featuring reflections from the freedom school. Anticapitalist in content and form, the pamphlet featured an “anticopyright” encouraging free reproduction of the document in part or in full. Caffentzis (2014: 29), contributing to the project, claimed that the differences between the Conference for Humanity and against Neoliberalism and the little school illustrated how “the Zapatistas have expanded their political pedagogy” (29). Visitors in 2014 were referred to as “students” instead of “compañero/as,” underscoring the explicit educational intent while affirming the importance of discourse. The focus in 2014 was on the learner, who spent the day with a Zapatista host, an arrangement that fostered opportunities for collectivity. While emphasis had been on written and oral language during the conference, during the freedom school the focus was on revalorizing the body as the main medium for experiential learning, privileging it as the site for experiencing liberation. Linebaugh (2014) even related the resonance of Zapatismo to Paulo Freire’s location of praxis in a context of love for each other and for the world. She had entered the school, she explained, with questions about how to live in this world, but she walked away with questions about how to live in a new one.

Anti-Conclusion: Zapatismo as Recollection

If the resonance of Zapatismo has little to do with Leninist politics, rhizomes, or fetishism of communication technologies, how is it to be understood? One way is as recollection, since the images of other worlds that it asserts as possible cannot be “given in the immediate experience which prevails in the repressive societies” (Marcuse, 1972: 70). This is not recollection in the sense of recalling a perfect past (which never existed) or exalting a pristine primitive culture (which was neither pristine nor primitive nor monolithic enough to refer to in the singular) but recovery and “remediation” of “the distorted humanity and distorted nature” of “the domain of the imagination” (70)—and not just there. Recollected ideas “are given rather as the horizon of experience under which the immediately given forms of things appear as ‘negative,’ as denial of their inherent possibilities, their truth” (70). This is why Marcos (2001: 440) called Zapatismo “an intuition,” even though the intuitive (recollective, imaginative) process cannot be extricated from critical reflection and the action it can inform. As historical beings, humans “tri-dimensionalize time into past, present and future” (Freire, 2000 [1970]: 101) and realize the possibility of liberation beyond the given reality through recollection. What recollection projects against and beyond must also be posed as a problem, invoking a radical imaginary filled with tension between the ideal and real, the possible and the actual. As a movement against the un-freedom of identity imposed by thinking within our antagonistic reality, Zapatismo not only promotes critical awareness of the limitations of thought but also constitutes a pedagogy of problem posing to imagine and prefigure (recollect) life beyond the prevailing political-economic boundaries circumscribing ideas, action, and sensibilities. If it resonates, perhaps that is why.