Open Collections

Herlich Garber, Elijah

University of British Columbia

On January 1st, 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) declared war on the Mexican government in an act of militant opposition to a long history of land dispossession, privatization, and exploitation carried out through the collaboration of the state and private interests in Eastern Chiapas that culminated in the reforms to Article 27 and the implementation of NAFTA. Following the initial uprising on January 1st, and with greater urgency in the following years, the Zapatistas declared their autonomy, which entailed independence from the Mexican government both territorially and organizationally as a way for the creating and practicing ways of living that would otherwise be impeded by the state and capitalism. In this thesis, I argue that through its essential connection to territorial autonomy, the Zapatista political philosophy of power to be provides a significant counter to the Lockean understanding of how land, freedom, and power are connected, which takes private property and its protection by the state as an essential component to creating freedom through territory. Additionally, I argue that despite substantial similarities between the Zapatista movement and prominent European and Mexican notions of Anarchism, there are notable tensions that emerge from theoretical differences on the nature of human-land relations but also from the tendency of some anarchists to dismiss the Zapatista movement or attempt to subsume it under the label of Anarchism without appreciating its distinctiveness and the political potential that its distinctiveness holds. I thus argue that if we turn to Richard J.F. Day’s anarchistic logic of affinity, solidarity between non-state, anti-capitalist movements becomes more feasible, since the revolutionary subject within that logic links with similar struggles or movements, yet is also never totalized. I conclude my discussion of Anarchism and the Zapatistas by arguing that this anarchistic logic of affinity can be found in the work of Glen Coulthard on self-affirming praxis and of Taiaiake Alfred on Anarcho-Indigenism, both of which embrace the possibilities for movement building that allows for affinity without subsumption.

Text

2023-09-01

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85766

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/