The Zapatista challenge: Politics after catastrophe

Counterhegemony and constituent power

Since the late 1980s, the political landscape of Latin America has changed drastically due in large part to a series of explosive revolts that shook the region, with the Zapatistas’ 1994 uprising against the Mexican government constituting what was perhaps the most iconic of these. Each of these revolts certainly carried its own internal justifications, which may or may not have been understood by the region’s other struggles, but undoubtedly their most immediately common and legible reason was the destabilizing effects of neoliberal restructuring (free trade and the attempts at privatization of communal lands in Mexico, International Monetary Fund (IMF)-sponsored elimination of gasoline subsidies in Venezuela, the privatization of gas and water in Bolivia, and the effects of monetarization on the Argentinean economy). Although the revolts varied significantly, most often they were instigated by organizations and movements of populations identified as racially subaltern (specifically, Black and indigenous segments of Latin American society). The atmosphere of “generalized insurrection and insubordination” (Gutiérrez, 2014) created by these disparate groups proved extremely effective, first in making the continuation of the neoliberal status quo in the region unworkable (which is rather different than stating that they were able to end neoliberalism), and second, in profoundly delegitimizing the established national “historic blocs” that had so effectively sutured economic and (White) racial privilege in the region since “independence.”

Consequently, the mass uprisings in the region allowed for the idea of politics to re-emerge and more directly confront the limitations of its antagonists. The latter include both the electoral formalism of the previous hegemonic order that had violently sought to deny social division, as well as the left of previous decades that had all too quickly reduced questions of revolutionary political action to armed struggle (i.e. foquismo as just one very influential example, see Debray, 1967) and thus viewed any work with existing state structures solely as capitulation and mere “reformism.” This initial displacement in turn allowed for a deep reconceptualization of the relation between these new forces of insubordination and the state so as to attempt a more permanent opening of the institutions of “representative democracy” to the creative insurgent forces outside of it. In sum, these initial revolts were the key condition of possibility for the reconceptualization of the relation between reform and revolution, beyond the dichotomous disjunction that had too often dominated political outlooks across the region. In order to better understand how a number of different forces in the region envisioned this reconceptualization, we will draw upon (as did much of Latin America’s intellectual left) the work of two rather disparate social theorists—Ernesto Laclau and Antonio Negri—and then return to how, by the mid-1990s, the EZLN had already put into practice a politics that deeply embodied and perhaps prefigured these ideas while also having the vision to foresee a set of new limitations not accounted for in the region’s dominant left tendencies.

While any serious examination of the possibilities and limitations of each of these theorists would require far more space than we have here, and although such an examination would certainly have to acknowledge, as the authors themselves have done (Laclau, 2004; Negri, 2015), the ultimately incompatible political presuppositions of their frameworks, my interest here is rather different. I would like to show that the work of these thinkers helps us to capture a certain ethos of distinct political currents that, although oftentimes at odds, co-existed within the milieu of Latin America’s anti-neoliberal left. Thus, I contend that their work might help us conceptually approximate the vibrant political moment in the region between the early 1990s and mid-2000s before we turn to how the EZLN would offer a coherent alternative that allowed the Zapatistas to endure long beyond that moment.

From a Laclauian perspective, the initial symbolic displacement of both the neoliberal agenda and the hegemonic bloc that had managed the period of its introduction into Latin America had eroded the stability of the representational order, opening a symbolic gap at its center. This symbolic gap for Laclau is nothing other than the structural location of the “empty signifier” within which the emerging counterhegemonic forces have to struggle in order to redefine the nation’s “people” (Laclau, 1996, see also Laclau, 2005: 69–71). Political struggle from within this framework is made up of succeeding attempts to make the structural location of the empty signifier the space for the articulation of a number of seemingly unrelated struggles. This struggle in turn serves to widen the field of political representation to include previously subjugated populations, while practically unifying a rather disparate social field of marginalized subjects against the re-emergence and reconsolidation of the neoliberal bloc. Politics itself then, from this “populist” perspective, consists of the displacement of the existing hegemonic bloc and the consolidation of a new (counter)hegemony of formerly marginal subjects.

Importantly, the EZLN was no stranger to the political power of the empty signifier. In formulations that suggestively parallel Laclau, the Zapatistas state that following 12 days of armed action against the Mexican government, they chose to follow a discursive strategy that centered around the attempt to construct the faceless figure of “Marcos” as a placeholder for the desires of the widest swath of Mexican society possible. As the EZLN now notes, at that time there was a “Marcos” for every occasion and every political persuasion (Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), 2014a). Mexican society took up this figure as their own, as evidenced by the highly popular refrain of “Todos somos Marcos.” This phrase had the virtue of illustrating precisely the political potential of the empty signifier, in that, in Spanish it simultaneously denotes the power of this figure to unite (i.e. “We are all Marcos”) as well as to premise that space of unity on an “emptiness” or radical social dispersal (i.e. “Marcos is all of us”). The Zapatistas hoped then that through the empty signifier of “Marcos” an extremely fragmented Mexican “civil society” might unite against the common neoliberal enemy of Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s dictatorial Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) (see also Reyes, 2015).

Yet, the Zapatistas always viewed themselves as an articulating force—outside the given institutions of representative democracy—that would work with all those who saw themselves reflected in their faceless masks to force open a space within those institutions. This was a strategy that might therefore require alliances with counterhegemonic projects sympathetic to this array of new social forces from below. Thus, in addition to internally building a well-structured organization, the Zapatistas also became a space for the construction of the “counterhegemony of the diverse” (Rabasa, 2010) that would lead to the construction of a new constitutional assembly and the adoption of a new constitution for all of Mexico. Despite this, as a force with a large and well-organized social base highly antagonistic to existing state institutions, the Zapatistas were able to set their own goals a step beyond those of the merely counterhegemonic.

In contrast, throughout much of the rest of Latin America the discursive strategy of the empty signifier was most often deployed by explicitly counterhegemonic projects that built their national presence through the symbolic value of subaltern figures in the national electoral realm (think here of Venezuela’s Fifth Republic Movement with Hugo Chávez (MVR) or the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia with Evo Morales). These projects often borrowed directly from Zapatista rhetoric: “Todos Somos Evo” and “Todos Somos Chávez” can be seen on posters across Bolivia and Venezuela even today, with the final Chávez campaign going so far as to accompany this slogan with graphics depicting only Chávez’s eyes, creating the effect that he is wearing a (Zapatista) mask. ⁴ But these projects would only later—through the convocation of constituent assemblies or state-promoted “communes,” and already from within state institutions and with rather uneven results—seek to bridge their electoral apparatus above to the elements of the revolts below that had opened the social space necessary for their electoral victories.

Given the limitations of the counterhegemonic movements to account for the original subjects of revolt, it is no surprise that a second current took shape within the Latin American left. This current grew in importance and its political ethos might best be captured with reference to the work of Antonio Negri. Within Negri’s framework, the “unification” required by counterhegemony in order to discursively redefine “the people” necessarily consists of the attempt by a particular sector of society to give itself the verticalizing authority to define the people as a whole (a hegemonic moment that stands above the plane of immanence) (Negri, 2015). That is, this sector not only defines “the people” but through that action necessarily defines this new counterhegemonic force itself as the people. From this angle then, the redefinition of “the people” (no matter how “empty” this resignification might be) ends in the relegitimation of constituted power with only abstract and passing reference to its outside (an outside that appears in Laclau as the momentary breakdown of the representational order). Yet from this Negrian perspective, the initial force of social displacement of the hegemonic bloc (i.e. the opening of the symbolic gap) is not a structural effect but rather the result of the constituent power of a new social subject (i.e. “the multitude”) (Negri, 1999: 320). This subject, unlike “the people,” is composed of unrepresentable singularities whose power in every instance exceeds attempts to reduce it to the abstract substitution generated by the play of representation within constituted power. “Politics” within this framework is not simply the occupation of the structural location of “the empty signifier” by previously marginalized subjects (something that might in fact be achieved by “populist” actors with just about any ideological agenda). It is instead the institutionalization of those mechanisms that would undercut the self-referential vision of constituted power and open it to its primary and primal pre-condition (“an outside that [must] become an inside”): the disorganizing and constantly re-organizing force of constituent power. Here “constitution” can be nothing but “innovation” (Negri, 1999: 317). In other words, “politics” is nothing other than the constant reopening of “political power” to “political movement” (Negri, 1999: 31). As a vision that seeks to constantly interrupt but not supersede constituted power, these Negrian impulses within the Latin American left were not thought of so much as alternatives to but supplements for counterhegemonic projects—reopening them to the insurgent and disordering forces beyond the purview of the verticalizing effects of a merely representational politics.

If the Zapatistas were, at the time, in part a space where marginalized movements could forge a relation with counterhegemonic movements within the state structure, they were also careful to assure that they would not be subsumed by these counterhegemonic projects. That is, beyond their function as a bridge between “civil society” and the political party system in Mexico, the Zapatistas were deliberate about creating and defending the concrete material conditions of their “autonomy” where they could assure their continued independence from both the State and would-be counterhegenomic allies. In statements that would seem to parallel the political centrality of constituent power detailed above, the Zapatistas were careful to guard this autonomy because, as they explained, their stated goal was never to change the composition of the ruling class but to help create the mechanisms that would assure that the relation between rulers and ruled (between the movements of the marginalized and the state party system) would be fundamentally inverted (EZLN, 1994). Otherwise, they insisted, any struggle “between hegemonies” would inevitably end in a situation in which “for the rest of the society things basically don’t change (Subcomandante Marcos, 2001).” For the Zapatistas, it was only through this second more fundamental reconceptualization of the relation between movement and state (beyond mere counterhegemony) that marginalized subjects outside of the state could be recognized as the true drivers of political innovation and the sole source of legitimation. As the EZLN theorized and as Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez were fond of repeating, ⁵ the ultimate problem of politics is not then who is in government but rather “how to guarantee that those who rule, rule by obeying” (EZLN, 1994).

Although brief, the above narrative regarding the political ethos of the Latin American turn to the left serves to show that despite being a rather unique organization from its inception, the Zapatistas were very much at the center of the discussions that were taking place in the region regarding the innovative possibilities of a “politics” beyond the limitations of the bifurcated vision of state participation (i.e. “reform”) as resignation and “revolution” as armed struggle against the state. In this new imaginary, a different interplay of movement and state could allow a space for the implementation of reforms through state institutions while subordinating those reforms to the power of the insurgent social forces—that is, to the horizon of revolution. In other words, the wager at that juncture was on the possibility that the forces “below” could pry open the space within the state institutions to implement what I would like to call a set of rolling and ever-expanding “non-reformist reforms” from below. The Zapatistas were not only at the heart of this conversation but innovative in avoiding both capture by counterhegemonic projects as well as (thanks to the long-term propositional nature of their territorially based autonomous projects) the glorification of the merely “destituent” power of a multitude that in the rest of Latin America was thought capable of disrupting counterhegemonic pretensions but never of living without them. Few, if any, other organizations of that time were able to so productively make these contradictions—state/movement, reform/revolution, constituted/constituent—the very engine of their movement. This in turn made the EZLN the inspiration of movements around the world. Given the Zapatistas’ key role in forging this new imaginary, so influential across the region and for the “alterglobalization” movement as a whole (see, for example, De Angelis, 2000; McNally, 2006), it appears all the more incredible that after their 2005 break with the Mexican political class, the EZLN was accused of reintroducing a bygone “sectarianism” and the bifurcated vision of politics inherent in it (Almeyra, 2013; Proceso, 2009; Almeyra, 2006). Such accusations assume that the innovations of the last 30 years had simply washed over a politically autistic EZLN. Yet, as memory serves to show, the Zapatistas had not only assimilated the lessons of these past decades but in so many instances had actually invented them.

“Anti-neoliberalism” and the Mexican exception

The question remains, given that the Zapatistas were so instrumental in opening this imaginary of “non-reformist reform” from below, why after 2005 they changed strategic course and moved in a dramatically different direction than either the “counterhegemonic” or the “multitudinous” left in Latin America. As a useful counterpoint, I will begin with an examination of how South America’s “progressive governments” (which Mexico’s electoral left so emulated) attempted to tie “anti-neoliberalism” both to the desires of the revolts that had made them possible and to an anti-systemic imaginary. As I will detail below, although the EZLN’s uprising and ensuing discursive “anti-neoliberal” strategy effectively delegitimized the dictatorship of the PRI (Hernández Navarro, 2013), the particular nature of neoliberalism in Mexico that the EZLN rose up against assured that their attempts at building a “hegemony of the diverse” never translated into any fundamental changes in either the vision of the institutional left or its relationship to Mexico’s anti-systemic forces. This forced the Zapatistas, much earlier than other Latin American movements, to more directly confront the limits of counterhegemony under the structural constraints of contemporary capitalism.

If the desires of the initial revolts from Mexico to Argentina had been extremely wide-ranging and explosive, the bridge between these revolts and the counterhegemonic projects of the soon-to-be “progressive governments” was built around the common ground of “anti-neoliberalism,” with “neoliberalism” understood as an elite (if not imperial) offensive consisting of the privatizations, shock therapy, and trade liberalization that came to constitute “The Washington Consensus.” The content of the “anti” in the anti-neoliberal projects in South America, then, consisted of four key and closely intertwined elements that would directly challenge this consensus: (1) the occupation and re-emergence of the state as the central social actor, made possible by increased control of rents from extractive commodities; (2) the establishment of social subsidies that would blunt the most devastating effects of neoliberalism within the most marginalized populations; (3) the attempt to move foreign trade away from the unilateral impositions of the global hegemonic power—the United States; and (4) the effort to tie these elements to the affective charge of a vaguely defined long-term anti-capitalist horizon.

A brief summary of one of the most paradigmatic examples of these projects provided by Bolivian scholar and Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera offers us a sense of how these four “anti-neoliberal” elements were woven together in the counterhegemonic imaginary of the “progressive governments.” Linera (2006) proposed the construction of an “Andean-Amazonian Capitalism” which would require that the Morales government and its supporters carefully distinguish between a short-term tactical outlook and a long-term strategic vision. From Linera’s (2008) perspective, the question of “socialism,” and therefore anti-capitalism, was in the short-run simply off the table, but would have to be recuperated in a transitional phase through “Andean-Amazonian Capitalism.” As Linera details, the “Andean-Amazonian Capitalist” phase had to begin with the “construction of a strong state” that would function to regulate economic growth. In addition, this “strong state” would work to direct the profits of industrial growth, but more specifically the rents extracted from the “nationalization” of oil and natural gas to support the “autonomous development” and “self-organization” of the community forms proper to the Andes and the Amazon. It was the strengthening of this communitarian self-organization, according to Linera, that would in turn be the very basis upon which the reopening of the strategic questions regarding “socialism” might take place some 20–30 years down the road.

Practically, the transition to “Andean-Amazonian Capitalism” within the Morales government was tied to what they called their “New National Economic Productive Model” (Linera, 2008). In this model, though continuing to propound the necessity of a reinvigorated state (much as was the case for the rest of the “progressive governments”), the theme of support for the revolts that had brought them to power (in the case of Bolivia, that of communitarian self-organization) was quickly reduced to the availability of conditional cash transfers and social subsidy programs, when not disappeared entirely. Importantly, the initial emphasis on the strategic importance of communitarian self-organization was eclipsed by the tactical necessity of building state alliances with national and multinational corporations in order to promote private foreign investment in mining and the export of raw materials necessary for continued economic growth.

Finally, the short-term “neo-extractive” and “neo-developmental” (see Gudynas, 2009) tactics of “Andean-Amazonian Capitalism” were afforded social purchase by two novel situations wisely exploited by the “progressive governments.” The first was a truly exceptional global commodity boom that lasted from the early 2000s to 2014 (Gruss, 2014; World Bank, 2015). The second was the emergence of an economically robust and raw material starved Chinese economy that allowed the “progressive governments” to (at least relatively) weaken the hold of the US corporations and the US foreign policy (Webber, 2014). Both of these novelties made it possible for there to be an unusually large state capture of extractive rents and thus for continued discussion of a “strong state,” heightened social subsidies, and growing income in the context of an otherwise wage-starved de-industrializing economy.

Understanding Bolivia as a paradigmatic example of how the “anti-neoliberal” elements were taken up within the state by the “progressive governments” of South America provides a good entry point into the examination of why such a project did not and could not have taken place in Mexico. One rather conspicuous impediment faced by Mexico’s would-be counterhegemonic forces was the increasingly inextricable relation between Mexico’s economy and that of the United States, sealed with the signing of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Although often thought of as cause, NAFTA is better understood here as the consecration and intensification of this growing entanglement. While the consequences of this effective denationalization of the Mexican economy have been numerous, I would like to highlight three. First, after this shift, the Mexican economy shows all the classic signs of extreme dependence. As noted by Laura Carlsen (2008), with 85% of exports going to and over 60% of imports coming from the United States, Mexico has not since Spanish colonialism been so dependent on a single market for investment and trade as it is today on the United States. Second, as foreseen over a decade earlier by Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1978), by the mid-1990s foreign investment in Mexico was concentrated on rural lands and their extractive resources, creating a highly uneven and fragmented “national” territory. This investment has been so intense that today (nearly two and half decades since those lands and resources were first introduced into the “free market”) between 33% and 50% of Mexico’s territory and up to 90% of its productive lands are held through either lease or title by foreign logging and mining companies (Bárcenas and Galicia, 2011; Rodríguez García, 2015: 256). In addition, as highlighted by journalist Arturo Rodríguez García, the extraction of resources during this time has been absolutely unprecedented: throughout the entire colonial period, 190 tons of gold and 150 tons of silver were extracted from “New Spain”; under these new conditions some 420 tons of gold and 35,000 tons of silver were extracted from Mexico between 2000 and 2010 alone! (Rodríguez García, 2015: 256). The majority of this gold and silver was extracted by foreign corporations that did not even pay Mexico’s already highly circumscribed “value added tax” (IVA) due to NAFTA’s stipulations that companies’ corporate earnings are only reported in their country of origin (Rodríguez García, 2015: 256). Third, in this regard, the integration of the Mexican economy into that of the United States has severely affected the social location and function of the Mexican state. As noted by NAFTA’s own secretariat (Scott, 2003), the framework of NAFTA severely curtails the very possibility of state regulations, as those regulations can be construed within the NAFTA framework as “tantamount to expropriation” (Article 1110(1)) and would thus require state compensation—in effect making the Mexican State’s new function that of ultimate guarantor of a firm’s “right” to profitability.

Another major difference in the field of politics that distinguished the situation faced by counterhegemonic forces in Mexico from that of the rest of Latin America had to do with the anti-poverty programs. In the Latin American “progressive” imaginary—as articulated by Garcia Linera above—state subsidies and conditional cash transfers to the most marginalized sectors of the society were thought as a hinge of sorts between the expansion of immediate capitalist development and the possibility of a “socialist” future. In Mexico, however, such a path had already been forcefully foreclosed by Salinas de Gortari. During his 1988 presidential inauguration speech, Salinas de Gortari introduced what was at that point the largest program in poverty alleviation that the region had ever seen. Anticipating mass resistance to his own highly contested electoral victory as well as to his plans for the continuation of state privatizations and the end of land redistribution (and the resulting increasing social inequality these would imply), Salinas de Gortari and the dictatorship of the PRI implemented the “National Solidarity Program” (PRONASOL). PRONASOL was a rather unique mix of global institutional economic thinking, localized concern regarding counterinsurgency, and the continuation of the PRI’s clientelist control of Mexican society. On the one hand, Salinas de Gortari’s PRONASOL had been heavily influenced by the World Bank’s ongoing “poverty alleviation” turn (Birdsall and Londoño, 1997), particularly by its emphasis on the idea that simple state withdrawal from market regulation would lead to social instability. According to this doctrine, a third way was needed in “less developed countries” that would carefully avoid mere state abdication as well as redistributive state intervention while instead focusing on the creation of “incentives” in the form of taxes and subsidies to increase “Pareto efficiency” (Stiglitz, 1986). This efficient intervention would help integrate marginalized populations into the capitalist market while effectively eschewing the question of the internal relation between marginalization as such and the workings of that very market.

If poverty alleviation in the World Bank had from its very origins—in the thought of Robert McNamara (Zibechi, 2010)—a nearly inextricable link with counterinsurgency, in Mexico this link was reinforced by the very conscious efforts of Salinas de Gortari to neutralize radical opposition. Salinas de Gortari enlisted in this effort a large cadre of prominent former Maoists who, by then stripped of the horizon of armed insurrection, had instead quickly adopted the strategy of “entrismo,” or “entryism,” in which simply getting oneself into the halls of power was seen as an opening to future change. Happy to indulge this state of confusion, Salinas de Gortari, who had himself along with his brother Raúl been deeply involved in Mexico’s Maoist left, invited these former radicals to not only direct the national offices of PRONASOL but also to form the backbone of a capillary web of 140,000 “solidarity committees” that would elicit “participation” from the public at a local level (Polanco, 1997: 105). With this move Salinas de Gortari (and the PRI) assured three key goals: first, that those with the greatest knowledge of Mexico’s marginalized and increasingly economically superfluous communities would be in his service; second, that those most likely to be associated with systemic opposition to neoliberalism would be most invested in popularizing the necessity for participation in PRONASOL; and third, that “participation” in PRONASOL (like most other “poverty alleviation” programs) would be carefully circumscribed so as to eliminate the issue of the relation between the growth of economically superfluous populations and the very policies, particularly that of the privatization of rural lands and the flexibilization of labor, promoted by his administration. Thus, the dynamic of “exclusionary participation” (Bascones, 1995) that characterized PRONASOL assured that energy and opposition would be redirected to questions regarding the “fair” and “proper” distribution of subsidies for food, schooling, and small-scale infrastructure. ⁶ All of this had the rather ironic cumulative effect of actually strengthening the PRI’s clientalistic control over Mexican society at the very moment it had announced that the era of redistribution had come to an end.

Despite having at best a checkered relation to poverty reduction, PRONASOL proved so successful at mitigating political opposition to neoliberalism that it eventually became the model for a succession of “progressive governments” to build their own subsidy and conditional cash transfer programs. Although sympathy for the PRI and its counterinsurgent intentions by the “progressive governments” may appear rather distant, these links should not be underestimated. In April 2013, in an obvious effort to take aim at the symbolic heart of Zapatismo, PRI President Enrique Peña Nieto organized a large media event in Zinacantan, Chiapas, to relaunch his “National Crusade Against Hunger” (the PRI’s latest iteration of PRONASOL). Seemingly taking notes directly from the Salinas de Gortari’s playbook, Peña Nieto rolled out this new subsidy program in an effort to distract from a series of very large and contested neoliberal structural reforms. This time, however, in what may have come as a surprise to many but seems instead like a frank recognition of the origins of Brazil’s Bolsa Familia program, Enrique Peña Nieto was flanked by none other than former Brazilian President and “progressive government” icon Luiz Inacio “Lula” Da Silva. Clothed from head to toe in indigenous dress, Lula turned to Peña Nieto and proclaimed, “just like I did it [pull people out of poverty] in Brazil, I know you will do it here in Mexico!” ⁷ Here we must note that despite the fact that the PRONASOL-style projects would become highly influential in the “progressive governments,” the early appearance of this program in Mexico meant that the “neoliberalism” against which the Zapatistas rose up, unlike revolts in the rest of Latin America, explicitly and very specifically included PRONASOL, which they had from the beginning denounced as an attempt to redirect popular attention away from redistributive demands (particularly, land reform and the protection of collective landholdings). In sum, the Zapatistas’ 1994 rebellion was at least in part directed at the very policies that would later become the backbone of legitimation for the “progressive governments.”

The effects of the denationalization of the Mexican economy that I have laid out above, as well as the hegemonic neoliberal bloc’s political ownership of State subsidies and cash transfers should make clear that the key elements of the “counterhegemonic” vision tying “progressive governments” to both non-state elements and to an anti-systemic future in the rest of Latin America were simply not viable (within the given institutional framework) in Mexico. In sum, the “return of the state” was foreclosed by the binding framework of NAFTA that assured that extractive rents would be directly captured by either the US or Canadian corporations and that little could be done by representative officials within the Mexican State to change that. In addition, the conditional cash transfer programs were the purview of the existing hegemonic bloc and had long been rejected by the initial revolts of the mid-1990s in Mexico. The overwhelming dependency on the US markets for trade (institutionally cemented in NAFTA) assured that unlike much of the rest of Latin America, any shift toward a growing Chinese economy would remain marginal at best for Mexico, and Mexico would, if anything, encounter China as a fierce competitor for the US consumptive market (as has in fact been the case, see David et al., 2012: 11; Dussel, 2005). For all these reasons, the economic and political dynamics of Mexico would remain out of sync, if not exceptional, to those of the rest of the region for the entire era characterized by the political cycle of the “progressive governments.”

The neoliberalization of Mexico’s institutional left

The first visible political consequence of Mexico’s exceptional dynamics examined above was the deterioration of anything resembling a contestatory “anti-neoliberal” horizon within the countries’ would be counterhegemonic forces. This deterioration became evident at three different moments in that country’s recent political history. The first of these moments (which today often goes unmentioned) occurred in 2001 when the institutional left in the Mexican Senate (under the banner of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)) joined with the right-wing PRI (then under the authority of Manuel Bartlett, today a key member of López Obrador’s inner circle) and the National Action Party (PAN) to defeat the widely popular Constitutional Reforms on Indigenous Rights and Culture sponsored by the EZLN (but conceived jointly with representatives of 56 indigenous peoples and numerous constitutional scholars). These reforms, in the tradition of “non-reformist reform from below,” would have reintroduced a means of protection for collective indigenous land tenure, put a brake on both the sale and fragmentation of Mexico’s rural lands, impeded the explosion of extractive industries, and provided the very material ground for the growth and sustenance of a political opposition ready to make even more demands.

As such, these reforms would have been an enormous challenge to the key pillars of neoliberal order in Mexico. But these reforms were cut short, and as Mexican journalist Luis Hernández Navarro (2013) has pointed out, the alliance between the PRI, PAN, and PRD that defeated them had been in existence as early as the 1996 “Barcelona Accords.” In these accords, the PRI offered a new set of “rules of the game” that would in effect open the way for the PAN and PRD to share political power with the PRI in exchange for providing support for both President Ernesto Zedillo’s (PRI) refusal to follow through with peace accords it had just signed with the EZLN and the increased paramilitarization of the State of Chiapas. Importantly, then, it was the marginalization of the EZLN through the “Barcelona Accords” that had actually opened the era of “concertación” (Rodríguez García, 2015) that would be characterized by mercurial alliances in which electoral success clearly trumped any remaining ideological principles. From then on it was not unusual to see a Party of the Democratic Revolution–Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRD-PRI) alliance against the candidate of the PAN in a northern state, and during that very same election cycle a Party of the Democratic Revolution–National Action Party (PRD-PAN) alliance in the southern states, or a National Action Party–Institutional Revolutionary Party (PAN-PRI) alliance against the PRD in the center region of the country, and so on. In other words, while the EZLN had been attempting to forge a bridge between the various social forces and at least parts of the institutional left, that same institutional left had come to the conclusion that its survival was instead inextricably tied to the health and future of the political class as a whole (what in Mexico is today called the “partidocracia” or “party-ocracy”). From then on, any possible alliance by the PRD with non-state social forces would simply have to be subordinated to that political class (Navarro, 2013).

The second moment in which the rightward shift of the institutional left became evident took place during the 2006 presidential election. Then-PRD presidential candidate López Obrador made a series of statements (eerily mirroring Lula’s 2001 “Letter to the Brazilian People” ⁸ ) in which he declared his peace with the global economic order and assured foreign investors that he was committed to maintaining “macroeconomic stability” (through low rates of inflation and reduced public spending). López Obrador made clear his intention to do everything possible to assure that, in his own words, “a bloated state doesn’t choke the initiative of private enterprise” (Petrich, 2011).

The third and perhaps most obvious moment of the open neoliberalization of the institutional left in Mexico came in December 2012 when the PRD (then in a free-fall toward collapse, with López Obrador having resigned from the party 2 months prior) signed the “National Pact for Mexico.” ⁹ This was a political agreement between the PAN, PRI, and PRD setting the terms of cooperation necessary to assure the legislative success of a whole slew of radical neoliberal reforms promoted by now-President Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI), including the privatization of the oil industry, the “flexibilization” of labor law, and deep cuts to spending on public education, many of which have since become law in Mexico.

Hegemony’s end

Following a rather early (2001) experience with the crisis of the institutional left as expressed in PRD’s betrayal of their proposed Constitutional Reforms on Indigenous Rights, the EZLN analysis and strategy changed dramatically. By 2005, after an internal re-organization of their presence across the State of Chiapas that culminated with the establishment of their centers for self-government called Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Good Government Councils), the EZLN announced its explicit break with the entirety of the political class (see Reyes, 2015). Although it has not been uncommon to see the EZLN’s post- 2005 position reduced to the “sectarianism” of old when not, as according to Mexican novelist Elena Poniatowska, to the personal “envy” of the EZLN leadership toward López Obrador (Maldonado, 2006). The argument mounted by the EZLN in the thousands of pages they have released since that time strongly suggests a far more interesting three-level analysis tying the institutional left’s evident lack of political principle to much deeper structural dynamics.

At the level of initial appearances, the EZLN’s critique focused on the PRD’s increasing collaboration and indistinguishability from the PRI and the PAN. At this level, the EZLN pointed out that it was rather difficult to give many of the key figures of López Obrador’s movement the benefit of the doubt given that so many of them had just months earlier belonged to the PRI. Furthermore, the EZLN exclaimed, many of López Obrador’s campaign team were key operators in the counterinsurgency efforts against the EZLN, with the PRD in Chiapas even having taken part in a state-wide paramilitarization campaign against Zapatista communities. ¹⁰ The EZLN believed that all of these elements—in addition to increasing cross-party collaboration (as had occurred in the veto of the EZLN’s constitutional reforms), the unprincipled “promiscuity” of party alliances, and the exclusive focus on electoral victory at all cost—were evidence of a non-existent ideological compass within the political class.

On a second level, however, the EZLN made clear that it did not believe that this situation was the consequence of merely subjective factors (i.e. the greed, stupidity, or vanity of the institutional left). They instead concluded that it was a result of the fact that these would-be “counterhegemonic” projects within the Mexican state, like that of López Obrador, objectively had no way to effectively respond to—let alone legislatively echo—the discontent that had led to events like the initial Zapatista uprising. The EZLN (2005b) argued that these forces were instead in the rather strange and dead-end position of attempting to convince the Mexican electorate that the continuation of Salidas de Gortari and the PRI’s “social liberalism” in the form of increased subsidies would be the antidote to … well, Salinas de Gortari’s and the PRI’s “social liberalism.” Thus, for the EZLN, the increasing alliance of the PRD and the rest of the political class was the result of an honest recognition by the institutional left that within a denationalized and refunctionalized Mexican state, any challenge to the neoliberal order that went beyond a “Pareto efficient” intervention was now outside of its structural possibilities. In other words, what the actions of the Mexican institutional left put on display was that the Mexican State itself had entered a new era in its relation to capitalist development that would peremptorily neutralize counterhegemonic strategy.

As the EZLN (2007) saw it, in years past the struggle for “hegemony” had been premised on the idea that the sites of social reproduction were “the family, school, work, the media, the electoral system, the administration of justice, the military and police, and government.” Within this schema, the role of the state and of the politician was to assure the stability of those sites, which although ultimately beneficial to the reproduction of capitalism as a whole, gave the state and its functionaries a particularly important role as sources of power over and above these other sites. But for the Zapatistas, what the conduct of the institutional left in Mexico indicated was actually the end of this entire era of the social reproduction of capitalism. As they hypothesized, the responsibility for reproduction had now been placed not on the state and its functionaries but directly onto the transnational capitalist market and the “educational” role of money (EZLN, 2007). Importantly, within this new context, the politician no longer participated in creating a cohesive (even if unjust) and dominant social order, or “hegemony” (EZLN, 2007). According to the EZLN, the political class had been assigned a new role as a retaining wall of sorts that would serve to assure that the inevitable disorder emanating from this new reproductive schema did not overflow and become an impediment to further accumulation (a role that had already been demonstrated, for example, in the “Pareto efficient” interventions of PRONASOL). The political class’ function had shifted from molders of order to managers of disorder. The end of the hegemonic schema of reproduction and the new role of the political class was no small thing for the EZLN. In fact, they claimed that for them it amounted to nothing less than the “end of representative democracy” (EZLN, 2007), and in this new era, those would-be “counterhegemonic” projects that presented themselves heroically as the latest contenders in a struggle to “take power” were in reality nothing more than participants in a squabble over the occupation of administrative posts whose function had already been subordinated to a power well beyond their reach (EZLN, 2015b). Yet the question remains: why did the hegemonic schema of reproduction cede to that of this new schema which the Zapatistas referred to as “the empire of money”? In order to answer this question we must refer to the third and most expansive level of the EZLN’s post-2005 analysis of Mexico and the world.

Mafia capitalism and the snowballing catastrophe

At this third and most expansive level of analysis, the Zapatistas put forth the thesis that the collapse of the hegemonic schema and thus of counterhegemonic possibilities was at the very heart of “neoliberal globalization” (EZLN, 1997). Yet, in sharp distinction to many counterhegemonic forces in Mexico and the world today, the Zapatistas did not interpret “neoliberal globalization” as the consequence of a state capture by ideologically driven elites attempting to carry out a project for the benefit of the ruling classes (EZLN, 2005b). For the Zapatistas, “neoliberal globalization” was not an aberrational deviation from mainstream capitalism that could thus be reverted through an electoral realignment and the inauguration of new governments. This was not possible for the simple reason that according to them, “neoliberalism” was not the consequence of deleterious government policy. Rather, as they explained, the problems presented by “neoliberalism” are instead “systemic” (EZLN, 2015a). As the EZLN would make clear, far from a subjective whim of the dominant classes, “neoliberalism” was for them the involutionary consequence of attempts to “stabilize” capitalism out of an objective crisis that was taking place at the outer limits of the “self-valorization of value” (Marx, 1976).

The Zapatistas have described this process of the development and crisis of value production in contemporary capitalism through a powerful metaphor (EZLN, 2013). They invite us to imagine the historical development of capitalism as a high-rise building. According to them, those at the top of the capitalist world/building would previously add floors to the building (a metaphor for the expansive dynamic of the “self-valorization of value”) via a variety of processes that depended on those at the bottom: exploitation, dispossession, repression, and disvalorization—what the EZLN calls “the four wheels of capitalism” (EZLN, 2005b). This process of adding floors (i.e. value production) allowed those above to distinguish their own position from those below while simultaneously giving rise to the hope among those below that they might one day leave their current floor behind and ascend to new heights within the capitalist world building.

Yet, according to the EZLN, the single defining characteristic of contemporary capitalism consists in having lost the capacity to build more floors—that is, to expand the “self-valorization of value”—as this process has in fact approached its absolute limits. Thus, our contemporary era and its institutions are marked by this historically unparalleled structural crisis of capitalism, a crisis that, given the rules of capitalism (i.e. value can exist only as its own expansion – as surplus value), is likely to get progressively worse (EZLN, 2015b). In this situation, those at the height of the capitalist world-building attempt to extend the life of the capitalist building by systematically turning toward “the reign of speculation” (the effort to collect exorbitant profits composed of a mass of non-productive money derived from the collection of debt, “rents” from the illicit economy, and the theft and extraction of exorbitantly priced natural resources) by attempting to compensate for the lack of value creation by simply extracting and expropriating everything that is left to cannibalize below (EZLN, 2005, 2015b). In this way, “neoliberal globalization” attempts to bypass entirely the production (and exchange) of commodities and the application of “abstract human labor” that produces them as the central source of profits. The “empire of money” is instead premised on the accumulation of “fictitious capital” which, as Marx had described, results from the illusion that more “value” can be born in the movement of mere money through the M-M’ circuit of speculation and credit (EZLN, 2015b: 314–326; Marx, 1976: 247–257). As a consequence of this new centrality of fictitious accumulation sans abstract labor, another key characteristic of our contemporary situation will be that even previously protected classes and even “races” will begin to fall into the category of those “who do not produce, do not consume, and who therefore cannot trade [or be valued] on the stock market” (EZLN, 1997).

In addition, the very mechanisms through which those at the middle and bottom of the capitalist world building might hope to climb floors (i.e. the mechanisms for the redistribution of capitalist value) shrivel and disappear as they too were dependent on the dynamics of value expansion now absent within contemporary capitalism. Thus, while, on the one hand, larger and larger swaths of humanity have become or are in the process of becoming systemically “superfluous,” on the other, capitalism today lacks the substantive mediational mechanisms to deal with this population and instead menacingly pronounces that “everything that is superfluous can be eliminated” (EZLN, 1997).

If in this situation, the state is stripped of its previous mediational and redistributive duties, today it is enlisted as another actor in what amounts to a “war” that slowly permeates society (EZLN, 2015b). As can be read on a daily basis in most major newspapers, the truly catastrophic consequences for Mexico of this capitalist involution and “war” have been the following: first, a growing indistinguishability between state actors, multinational corporations, and organized crime; second, a de facto cancelation of the constitutional framework and the militarization of the police function (i.e. the growth of legal exceptionality) through the declared “war on organized crime”; and finally, the construction of a system of rule through terror in which the lack of clarity for the reasons of violence are matched only by its brutality (which has resulted in over 150,000 deaths, 30,000 disappeared, and hundreds of thousands of internally displaced). But for the Zapatistas the key to understanding Mexico’s situation “is not [then] that the political system has links to organized crime, to narcotrafficking, to attacks, aggressions, rapes, beatings, imprisonments, disappearance, and murders,” but rather that “all of this today constitutes the very essence of that system” (EZLN, 2014b). Much like the Zapatistas, Italian journalist Roberto Saviano (in Hernández, 2013) rejects the idea that the problem faced by the people of Mexico can be understood by concentrating on the fact that the mafia has become a transnational capitalist enterprise that has in effect co-opted the Mexican state. Rather, Saviano insists that in order to truly comprehend what is happening in Mexico, and increasingly throughout the world, one has to come to terms with the far more chilling possibility that the state has become a mere conduit to a “[transnational] capitalism that has transformed itself into a mafia” (Hernández, 2013: viii–x).

Finally, the EZLN points out that although this “reign of speculation” has already had catastrophic effects for Mexican society, these effects are but a mere drizzle when compared to “the gathering storm” they insist is now on the horizon (EZLN, 2015b: 27–32). Today, the world faces a whole new set of interlocking problems stemming from the “reign of speculation”: the exhaustion of financially driven growth in China (Hoekman, 2015); the impossibility of export-led growth in Germany (the engine of European stability for the last two decades) without burying the rest of Europe in debt and “austerity” (Kurz, 2010); and the collapse of the commodity boom in South America and the consequent reduction of regional growth to zero (World Bank, 2015). Within the Zapatistas’ analysis, all of these are signs that the methods that were adopted to stabilize the “reign of speculation” in the late 2000s, which in turn was an attempt to stabilize the capitalist crisis, have themselves reached a point of exhaustion. Consequently, the near future is likely to hold a level of instability, violence, and chaos that much of the left (still fixated on the question of state administration) is poorly positioned to understand, let alone combat. The catastrophe is upon us.

The bad new days

Having lived through and carefully examined the rather exceptional dynamics of Mexico since the turn of the century, the EZLN undertook a strategic shift that would for a long time place them out of step with dominant strains of the left in the rest of the Latin America. At the very height of the “progressive governments” and their would-be counterhegemonic aspirations, the EZLN markedly took their distance. This seeming untimeliness of the EZLN’s outlook would cost them much of the influence and sympathy they had previously enjoyed, but they did not flinch from what they saw as their responsibility to continually move forward based on the lessons they had learned through their struggle, even when those lessons flew in the face of popular opinion on the left. Before moving on to the propositional aspects of the EZLN’s outlook after the early 2000s, I would like to first summarize what I see as the explicit and implicit insight that the EZLN gained during these years.

The first insight was the following: if the Latin American revolts of the late 20th century had (re)opened the possibility of “non-reformist reformism” from below—a strategic outlook that sought to make concrete demands on the State for particular reforms that would necessarily open up to further reforms in an ever-expanding process—that possibility had been quickly foreclosed by the appearance and perfection of a “non-reformist reformism” from above adopted by much of the political class. The latter was exemplified by the proliferation of subsidies and cash transfer programs where the oppositional demands of the movements were internalized by the political class and re-presented to the movements in a manner that raised the expectation of political transformation while cementing the very social relations that gave initial rise to movement demands. Almost as if directly inspired by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel Il Gattopardo, in the contemporary era the political class as a whole, but most surprisingly the institutional left, was fully ruled by the dictum, “If we want everything to remain the same, then everything must change” (what in Mexico is popularly referred to as gatopardismo). Having carefully followed the rise of this “non-reformist reformism” from above, it seems that the EZLN concluded that if they continued on the path followed by much of the “counterhegemonic” and “multitudinous” left they would end up, like the Mexican institutional left, mired in a hall of mirrors in which it was effectively impossible to disentangle one “non-reformist reformism” from the other. This would imply the smothering of demands from below from within the structural parameters of a highly speculative and destructive moment of capitalism while producing the symbolic charge associated with change.

Second, although in this situation the institutional left appeared shortsighted and hypocritical, the EZLN did not confuse that left’s gatopardismo with the cause of the problem that they faced, but rather saw it as an effect. Moving beyond narratives of personal “betrayal” that are today so common with regard to the institutional left around the world, the EZLN came to see that this betrayal was instead structural. They theorized the loss of political principle by the institutional left as a direct effect of the shift in the schema of the social reproduction of capital. Now, the “empire of money” effectively displaced the political class and the State from their previous “hegemonic” and mediational functions, ending their capacity to positively (even if minimally) disrupt capitalist dynamics. In this new situation, the State and the political class were merely middle management, seeking to implement decisions that were very clearly no longer made by them.

Finally, they concluded that this shift in the schema of social reproduction of capital that had been widely recognized as “neoliberalism” was not the result of a newly exaggerated avarice of the ruling classes. Rather, this shift was the result of an unprecedented structural crisis of capitalism that in effect presented the very real possibility that the “self-valorization of value” (i.e. what is often referred to as “growth”) was up against limits it could no longer displace. In response to this lack of value expansion, capitalists had attempted to stabilize their own situation and that of capitalism generally through the desperate search for mere money (profits devoid of value). In this sense, the unspoken material (i.e. capitalist “growth”) that may have previously served as a bridge to unite a proposed tactical cooperation within a capitalist present to a strategic anti-capitalist future as proposed by the “progressive governments” had vanished. Therefore, the counterhegemonic projects (such as that of “Andean–Amazonian capitalism”) that appeared to be the diachronic unfolding of a future socialist project were far more likely to imply the synchronic stabilization of an increasingly inegalitarian and ultimately unsustainable capitalist present.

Time would seem to have proven the Zapatistas right on this wager. Although at the beginning of the century it appeared that Mexico was living through dynamics that were strangely exceptional to the rest of the region, in retrospect it is clear that what was exceptional was the highly financialized commodity boom (itself a consequence of the structural crisis of value expansion) which formed the backbone of the social programs of the “progressive governments.” That boom has passed and along with it the stability of the progressive governments, and as a consequence much of South America is today beginning to awaken to the looming consequences of a catastrophe that has already engulfed Mexico. This early experience of the eliminationist consequences of contemporary capital forced the EZLN to completely rethink their strategic foundations. This is the Zapatista challenge; to rethink politics after the era of expansionary capitalist dynamics, to rethink politics after the catastrophe. Anti-capitalism appears here as more than a subjective ideological choice. If, as the EZLN theorizes, that “form of life” called capitalism can today continue only through a “war” that targets the survival of large swaths of humanity, then the question of the egalitarian supercession of capitalism and the production of “another form of life” can no longer be wishfully postponed. It presents itself today as immediate objective necessity. As Brecht would have it, the Zapatistas today insist that we stop building on the good old days (the nostalgia for the growth and redistribution of capitalist value), and instead learn to unflinchingly face the bad new ones (the involutionary dynamics that form the very basis of the afterlife of capitalism) (Benjamin, 219).

Is there life after capitalism?

At the very moment when so many have declared them irrelevant, the Zapatistas re-emerged with a powerful political vision and a concordant organizational practice, each of which I believe contains innovations that might help inspire the (re)emergence of an anti-capitalist left around the world. The Zapatistas have stated again and again that taking up the challenge of rethinking politics after catastrophe does not equal declaring one’s support for them. This challenge must instead begin from an analysis of and ruptures with the very disparate and uneven conditions across time and space produced, nevertheless, by a common global situation. Despite this, I would like to offer here a very brief overview of what building a politics after the catastrophe has implied for the EZLN in Southern Mexico—lest we mistakenly believe that the Zapatista challenge remains merely rhetorical.

After their break with the Mexican political class, the EZLN made it a point to forefront the seven principles that gave purpose to their organization (“To serve, not to serve oneself; to represent, not supplant; to construct, not destroy; to obey, not command; to propose, not impose; to convince, not conquer; to go below, not above.”). In fact, it is the decision to adhere to these organizational principles, they exclaim, and not ethnic identity or regional location, that makes them Zapatistas (EZLN, 2015c). Although in the years to come they were willing to change strategy as to how best to actualize these principles within our contemporary world, the principles themselves would remain non-negotiable. This they note stands in sharp contrast to the populist logic of the “applause-o-meter” (the number of likes, retweets, and protestors) that had become the sole judge and executioner for both the multitudinous and counterhegemonic left that became obsessed with image in a highly mediatized electoral arena (EZLN, 2015a). If, however, as the EZLN had concluded, access to state administration had long been delinked from “taking power,” then according to them the numerical fixation with the “99%” was most definitely not the marker of a hip and modern left, but rather the key indicator of a project without principles, and thus of the abandonment of politics tout court.

Despite breaking forcefully with the populist logic of the “99%,” the EZLN never invited anyone to abstain from elections. Rather, as then EZLN spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos stated on Mexican national television in 2006, “No, we are not inviting people to abstain. We are inviting them to something far more difficult than that, we are inviting them to think.” ¹¹ As the EZLN later elaborated, an honest examination of the systemic dynamics of contemporary capital shows that regardless of who wins the electoral contests of the day, “things will get worse”(EZLN, 2015b: 341). Far more important than voting or not voting—as they explained during their May 2015 “Seminar for Analysis and Reflection: Critical Thought Versus the Capitalist Hydra” (which had over 2600 attendees from every continent)—and far from the approval of the public relations machines of the electoral left, there is the production and circulation of “theoretical concepts” that serve as tools for political movements around the world to decipher the interconnected yet spatially ubiquitous manifestations of this unprecedented capitalist crisis. As they stated, if our contemporary situation has exceeded the parameters of the politics to which we had become accustomed, then our organizational structures must themselves be the “seedbeds” for new “ideas” that can help to better capture the nature of contemporary capitalism, and more importantly, to think what up until now has been the unthinkable: what it might take to end those dynamics (EZLN, 2015b: 353).

Although an important start, many would be inclined to claim that having recuperated the centrality of principles for politics and the rigor of critical thought as a bulwark against the vagaries of the contemporary left is hardly enough with which to build an anti-capitalist project. Yet, contemporary Zapatismo begins, but does not end, here.

Importantly for the EZLN, as the productive circuit of capital (M-C-M’) has been progressively subordinated to a speculative or “fictitious” circuit (M-M’), the accumulation of abstract wealth today increasingly bypasses the factory and state regulation and instead passes directly through the effective control of territories (extractive landscapes, gentrification, mass forced displacement, cartel lands, etc.) (EZLN, 2015b: 302–326). Thus, the spatial ubiquity of a capitalism desperate to collect speculative rents from every last crevice of social life must come at the expense of a dramatic loss of control by the state over the “national territory” and its people. Although this situation has most often produced the disastrous social consequences that we have discussed above, it simultaneously presents the very real possibility that within the cracks of this afterlife of capitalism, a life after capitalism might be built. That is, if the spatial organization of territories has become a key conduit to the collection of profits (without value) for the continuation of capitalism, then this opens the possibility that the restructuring of the simultaneous and inseparable production of spatial structure and social subject (what Henri Lefebvre (1976) called the “reproduction of the relations of production”) can within limited spaces in the here and now eliminate those social relations that sustain the production of abstract wealth as such. As locations for the reappropriation and production of real material wealth divorced from the imperatives of the “empire of money,” these spaces open the way for surviving the catastrophe while simultaneously recuperating the very possibility of non-capitalist social relations until recently lost in the strategy of “progressive” state administration, redistribution, and the unspoken reliance of both on the continuation of capitalist expansion. The Zapatistas have shown the power of this strategy on hundreds of thousands of acres and with hundreds of thousands of members in their “autonomous municipalities” across the State of Chiapas, powerfully highlighting that the practical recuperation of an anti-capitalist present must build upon the project of a conscious structural respatialization, a non-separatist territorial imperative.

Despite the fact that the above projects identify a possible opening toward the cessation of capitalist relations in the here and now, the cessation of those relations in and of themselves should not be confused with the egalitarian supercession of capitalism, as this cessation might just as easily imply the birth of new and horrible forms of non-capitalist domination. At this point, those working from a State -centric vision will quickly note that without the mediational intervention of the state, such directly territorial projects will more than likely devolve into redoubts and fiefdoms of warlords and thieves. Sadly missing from such analysis is of course the apparent obliviousness to the fact that today (as paradigmatically exemplified by the situation of Mexico) the primary redoubt of warlords and thieves is exactly the contemporary capitalist state. Nevertheless, the question remains that without mechanisms for large-scale coordination and social mediation, what will assure that such a project moves in the direction of upholding Zapatista principles and not in the direction of new forms of domination? Much like the original Zapatistas, today’s EZLN has built their response to this question starting from the experiences of the communities that compose it. For these indigenous people, what the EZLN calls the “form of life” of capitalism has from the very beginning been “unsustainable.” Marked by theft and genocide, the historical experience of these peoples who occupy the structural position of non-value within capitalism ¹² has until today been that of non-subjects of state politics. This “impossible” structural position, and the organization of the will to destroy it, has led them to both generate forms of organization alternative to the state in order to survive as peoples, as well as intuit the state as a derivative phenomena of the social form of value as such. As a consequence of this structural position, when determined to face the question of liberation, these subjects of non-value (i.e. non-subjects of the capitalist state)—from the Yaqui Indians to the original Zapatistas, from the Yucatan Mayas to today’s Zapatistas—have constituted long standing forms of government of which the primary effect is the practical annihilation of the state structure through the institutionalization of unrestricted mass political participation, that is, self-government (Gilly, 2005: 290). Thus, having built non-state forms of government from the village to the municipality all the way to the zone level across the official State of Chiapas, the EZLN notes that the reduction of possibilities to that of state mediation or mere spontaneity is a mere ruse, a ruse that is sustainable only when conflating the capitalist state with government tout court (EZLN, 2015a: 27) Perhaps, paraphrasing Adolfo Gilly’s assessment of the original Zapatistas, we might conclude that it is this recovery of government from the clutches of the capitalist state that defines the key contribution of the Zapatistas challenge for an anti-capitalist left.

Yet, given the EZLN’s analysis, it no longer seems possible to strike the tone of Gilly’s 1971 assessment of Emiliano Zapata’s Southern Liberation Army in which these forms of communal self-government were viewed as points of leverage that ideally would give way to a “peasant-worker” alliance and the eventual establishment of socialism at the national level (opening a possible relation of state and commune not dissimilar to Negri’s formula of a possible relation between “political authority” and “political movement”). No, the onset of the catastrophe and the consolidation of eliminationist capitalism has put an end to this illusion. What the Zapatistas seem to be clarifying is that the very racism inherent to capitalism (the historical assignation of people to the categories of value and non-value) makes it so that many can only see the communal structures as anachronistic historical remnants of a long lost “culture” or “identity.” But the very same people who discount these structures are themselves today being expelled from the world of capitalist value, and it behooves them to learn quickly from the experiences of those who for centuries found the means to survive while never having gained acceptance into that world. In that sense, for the Zapatistas, these communal structures are not only not the remnants of particular and anachronistic “cultures” and “identities,” but may in fact be the only bridge to a possible future for all of us who are now joining the structural position of non-value in an unhinged capitalist process that might otherwise proceed indefinitely. In other words, it is imperative that the experience of self-government and the innovation at the level of communalist “forms of freedom” (Bookchin, 2015) it makes possible should not be confused with a way into the eliminationist capitalist state, but rather, perhaps, as our only way out.

For the Zapatistas then, “autonomy” as the consolidation of these forms of communal self-government, initially made possible by non-separatist territorial respatializations (See Reyes and Kaufman 2011), is an explicitly universalizable practice (this in direct contradiction to the ethnicist readings of Zapatismo that still proliferate, see, for example, Harvey, 2015). In their own words, “that is why our struggle is not local, regional, or even national. It is universal. Because the injustices, crimes, dispossessions, disrespect, and exploitations are [also] universal, as are the rebellion, rage, dignity, and the desire to be better” (EZLN, 2016). Thus, while many are just beginning to recognize the radical political potential at the scale of communal self-government, the Zapatistas themselves seem ready to re-scale. That is, today, they appear to be undertaking efforts to coordinate among these autonomous projects at scales and distances as of yet untested, which will of course require the innovation of ever more complex forms of institutionality while never falling back on the institutionality of the value-form (i.e. the capitalist state). In other words, if the Zapatistas have until now attempted to answer their own challenge through the recovery of thought and principles, through the respatialization of their communities of influence, and through the innovations of the “forms of freedom” made possible by communal forms of organization, it seems that the future consolidation of these gains is likely to center on the success or failure of ongoing efforts to innovate at the level of ever-expanding rings of the inter-communal. In this way, one can imagine that through (impossible) efforts to coordinate among new non-contiguous and non-separatist territorial projects, the Zapatista challenge will give rise to a new global logic of accumulation—the accumulation of “autonomy.”