Arts, Faculty of
Political Science, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Herlich Garber, Elijah
Master of Arts - MA
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.
When the Theoretical Confronted the Practical: Zapatista Territorial Autonomy as Opposition to the Cooperation of State and Capitalism by Elijah Herlich Garber H.B.A., University of Toronto, 2021 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Political Science) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2023 ©Elijah Herlich Garber, 2023 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: When the Theoretical Confronted the Practical: Zapatista Territorial Autonomy as Opposition to the Cooperation of State and Capitalism submitted by Elijah Herlich Garber in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Political Science Examining Committee: Glen Coulthard, Associate Professor, Political Science and First Nations and Indigenous Studies, UBC Supervisor Anna Jurkevics, Assistant Professor, Political Science, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract 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 iv Anarcho-Indigenism, both of which embrace the possibilities for movement building that allows for affinity without subsumption. v Lay Summary The Zapatistas are a social movement based in Eastern Chiapas (Mexico) that have mobilized in response to state and capital-led privatization of Indigenous communal land. In this thesis, I argue that the territorial autonomy (independence from the Mexican state’s territory and government) enacted by the Zapatistas is part of and necessary for the theory and practice of the Zapatistas that seeks to strengthen ways of life that require communal land. Furthermore, I argue that Zapatista autonomy is in opposition to the logic of the liberal capitalist state that seeks to establish total control over territory through the imposition and enforcement of private property. I also argue that tensions that have arisen between Anarchism and the Zapatistas can be moved towards solidarity if the universalization of social movements is rejected in favour of a revolutionary project made of up of social movements that approach similar ends through disparate projects. vi Preface The following is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Elijah Herlich Garber. vii Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary .................................................................................................................................v Preface ........................................................................................................................................... vi Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................ vii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... viii I Introduction ............................................................................................................................1 2 A history of territory in Chiapas ..........................................................................................5 3 The Zapatista political philosophy of power to be and territorial autonomy .................18 3.1 Power to be and potentia ...................................................................................................19 3.2 Power to be and territorial autonomy ................................................................................23 4 Anarchism and self-affirmative praxis in conversation with the Zapatistas and power to be: noting divergence and attempted subsumption, and moving towards solidarity ........34 5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................46 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................49 viii Acknowledgements The Zapatistas are a movement that have I been interested in and inspired by since I was introduced to them through a course on Latin American social movements in my undergraduate degree. This thesis would not be possible without the knowledge building and movement building of the Zapatistas. The Zapatista fight against land dispossession was constantly on my mind as I undertook the work for this thesis on the traditional and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. I am thankful to be able to be able to carry out my life and work here, yet I am aware that to do so is to be caught up in the contradictions of doing so as an uninvited guest at a settler-colonial institution and furthermore, to perpetuate settler-colonialism. For this reason, it is of crucial importance that I commit myself both in my work and beyond it to solidarity with Indigenous peoples across this land. After all, being inspired by the Zapatistas entails a commitment to merge theory and practice in enacting a “¡Ya Basta!” to colonialism, capitalism, the neoliberal state, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and any other form of oppression that hinders the flourishing of humanity. Thank you to Dr. Martha Balaguera at the University of Toronto, who gave me a real introduction to the Zapatistas and inspired me to pursue the study of Latin American social movements and social movements in general. I will never forget and will be always grateful for her assurance and confidence in my ability to be a graduate student. I am doubtful I would have pursued graduate school in the way I have without her advice and support while at the University of Toronto. Thank you to my supervisor Dr. Glen Coulthard for being supportive and helpful on this project and for his comments on this thesis. It has been an incredible honour to work under the supervision of someone who has inspired and influenced me much as Dr. Coulthard. Thank you to my examiner Dr. Anna Jurkevics, who not only read, engaged, and gave insightful and ix useful suggestions on this work as an examiner, but also provided guidance at the earliest stages of this project encouraged me to pursue the supervision of Dr. Coulthard. From its inception to its completion, this thesis would not be what it is without Dr. Jurkevics’ support. Finally, I am deeply thankful for all my professors at UBC, and I would like to especially thank my initial academic supervisor Dr. Maxwell Cameron and Graduate Program Coordinator Christopher Fernandez for their personal support. Thank you to all the friends I have made at UBC and to all my friends back home in Toronto. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to work on this degree without you all. A special thank you to Vaishnavi Panchanadam for engaging with me and influencing my thinking throughout many thought-provoking conversations during the entirety of this degree, for her comments on this thesis, and for providing much needed assurance, encouragement, and inspiration throughout the whole process. Thank you to Kelsey Brady for her comments on this thesis. Rest in Peace to my friend Abel Gime, who passed away as I was working on this degree, thank you for the memories, you are missed. Through all my thinking about land and space during this project and this degree, an adequate description of my relation to Parkdale, a place I consider myself in some way to be a part of, continues to elude me. Without Parkdale, a place that is not a place without its community and is not a community without its place, I am not the person I am. I am influenced by Parkdale’s directly radical sprit of fighting landlords over rent increases and poor living conditions, and indirectly radical spirit of forming community through public schools, community centres, mutual aid, and affordable housing as a rejection to community building through private property (condo communities and trendy businesses). As Parkdale gentrifies, I feel less of a connection to something that is a part of myself. Gentrification too, must receive a x “¡Ya Basta!”, as it is the physical destruction of Parkdale as a place and as a community formed in that place. I would not think the way I do or act the way I act without Parkdale. Thank you to Parkdale for making me who I am. On the topic of making me who I am, nothing has contributed to who I am more than my family. I am incredibly lucky to have a giant network of family that have always supported me and my academic endeavors. Thank you to my amazing family, without all of you none of this at all would be possible. Thank you to Nina and Lola for being supportive and welcoming family here in Vancouver. Thank you to my Babba and Zaida, Eileen and Ralph Garber for their love and their unrelenting support of my studies. Thank you most of all to my parents, Naomi Garber and Elizabeth Herlich, and my brother Gabriel Herlich Garber for being there for me at every single moment, I love you all very much. There are not enough words I can put together here to describe the love, support, dedication, assurance, inspiration, and more that I have received from my parents that has allowed me to reach this point, or really any point at all. Again, thank you so much, you are the best. 1 I: Introduction Then, in this interweaving, in this exchange between two different forms of decision-making, the most orthodox proposals of Marxism or Leninism, theoretical concepts or historical references for example, that the vanguard of the revolution is the proletariat, that the taking of state power and the installation of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the aim of the revolution--were confronted by an ideological tradition that is, how can I say this, somewhat magical…The events of this last January will bring changes at the theoretical level as well. We arrived here and we were confronted by this reality, the Indigenous reality, and it continues to control us. Ultimately the theoretical confronted the practical, and something happened—the result was the EZLN. Therefore our combatants are right when they say, "We are not Marxist-Leninists, we are Zapatistas." –Subcommandante Marcos, 1994 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. Over the following years, the Zapatistas (those affiliated with the EZLN and the broader social movement) declared and began to practice the autonomy of their communities in Eastern Chiapas.1 Zapatista autonomy entails independence both territorially and organizationally from the Mexican government as a way for the creating and practicing of ways of living that would otherwise be impeded by the state and capitalism. This autonomy has been formed by the reciprocal theory-practice political philosophy of the Zapatistas that I call power to be in reference to Mariana Mora’s translation and interpretation of Juan López Intzín’s “el poder sentirsaber-sentirpensar”, that both enables and is enabled by territorial autonomy. The ability of those in Zapatista communities to have their modality of life realized separately from 1 Autonomy was demanded by the Zapatistas immediately in 1994 and was formally taken in 2003 with the formation of the five original caracoles. In 2019, the Zapatistas announced the creation of seven new caracoles and four new autonomous municipalities which has reportedly been made possible through the organization’s growth in territorial and social expansion as well as in organizational capacity. The Zapatista expansion is also argued to be (in part) a response to anarchists who have accused the Zapatistas of favouring electoral politics. This is one example of the tensions that arise between anarchists and the Zapatistas that are covered in the third section of this thesis. Leonidas Oikonomakis, “Zapatistas announce major expansion of autonomous territories”, ROAR Magazine (August 19, 2019), accessed at: https://roarmag.org/essays/zapatistas-announce-major-expansion-of-autonomous-territories/ 2 the hegemony of state-led liberal capitalism is realized through the seizing and claiming of territory as autonomous zones, that (given the reciprocal relationship) has itself become increasingly practicable as power to be is exercised along all aspects of social life and against the imposition of state and capital. Without the extent to which the Zapatistas have achieved territorial autonomy from the state and capital, the political project of the Zapatistas would be seriously limited. 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. Similarly to how EZLN and Zapatista spokesperson and leader Subcommandante Marcos (hereafter referred to as Marcos) argues that it is the Indigeneity of the Zapatistas that makes them proclaim: “We are not Marxist-Leninists, we are Zapatistas”, I find that although the Zapatistas share ideas with anarchists, it would be a considerable mistake both in academic comprehension and in encouraging solidarity to subsume the theory and practice of the Zapatistas into a (version of) a tradition that would not adequately encapsulate their value. 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 3 within that logic links with similar struggles or movements while also never being universalized. I argue 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 affinity without subsumption. To make this argument, this thesis is divided into three sections. The first section gives an overview of the history of Zapatista territory in Eastern Chiapas, with a focus on how the Mexican state and capitalism have worked together over time to exert power over the land. In this first section, I argue that the Mexican state has historically asserted its power in unison with capital to expropriate land from Indigenous peoples (mainly Chol, Tsotsil, Tseltal, and Tojolabal), peasants, and Indigenous peasants. I give an overview of this history to give the necessary context for how the Zapatista political philosophy and its relationship of theory and practice emerged from the struggle for land against the private property-oriented interests of the state and capital. The second section discusses Zapatista territorial autonomy and its relationship to the larger political project and political philosophy of the Zapatistas. In this section, I argue that the struggle for territorial autonomy in opposition to the unified exploitation by the state and capitalism is essential to the reciprocal theory-practice relationship that forms the Zapatista political philosophy of power to be. The third section places power to be in conversation with notable European and Mexican notions of Anarchism. In this section I elucidate the similarities and tensions between the Zapatistas and Anarchism and argue for a pathway towards solidarity. Before the first section, I would like to make what I understand to be an important note on the unique nature of the Zapatistas and of power to be. When the theoretical confronts or is confronted by the practical, a political philosophy emerges that is unique to its historical and practical circumstances. The political project of the Zapatistas involves a reciprocal relationship 4 between theory and practice that has been necessitated and fundamentally shaped by a long history of land struggle against the Mexican state and capital. Thus, this political project forms a political philosophy inseparable from the historically and geographically specific struggle for land and freedom. This, however, does not mean that the Zapatista political project is insular or irreplicable. The Zapatistas resonate with other social movements universally “[b]ecause the injustices, crimes, dispossessions, disrespect, and exploitations are universal. But so are rebellion, rage, dignity, and the desire to be better.”2 So, while the exact political project of the Zapatistas cannot be recreated, social movements and struggles that generate their own unique political projects in response to common problems and in an embrace of common ends are in a way linked to the Zapatista political project.3 This link occurs especially as they seek self-governance through autonomous territory. As Alvaro Reyes argues: “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.’”4 2 Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee-General Command [CCRI-CG], Insurgent Subcommander Moisés, and Insurgent Subcommander Galeano [formerly Insurgent Subcommander Marcos], “Words of the EZLN on the 22nd Anniversary of the War Against Oblivion,” In Enlace Zapatista: Archivo Histórico, January 1, 2016. 3 This linkage without totalization is an example of the anarchistic logic of affinity. 4 Alvaro Reyes, “The Zapatista Challenge: Politics after Catastrophe,” Cultural Dynamics 28, no. 2 (2016): 143–68, https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374016641437.: pp. 164 5 2: A history of territory in Chiapas The history of the struggle for land in Eastern Chiapas has its origin in the colonial conquest of Mexico by the Spanish. While it would be relevant to discuss the history of land in Mexico from the beginning of colonization until now, in this thesis I direct my focus on the history of land struggle from the 19th century onwards that contributed to the Zapatista rebellion and the role the Mexican state and capitalism played in this struggle. Thus, in this section I begin by providing a history of the struggle over land in Chiapas that emphasizes how state and capitalism worked together to impose private property on communal land. I discuss how this struggle created the conditions for the eventual Zapatista uprising and conclude the section by arguing that the cooperation between the Mexican state and capitalism outlined in this history resembles John Locke’s political thought on land, freedom, and the formation of sovereign government. Early struggles over land in Chiapas have a well-documented relationship between the use of state power and the expropriation of land occupied by Indigenous peoples. To give a brief idea of the conditions of the struggle over land in the early 19th century, Tseltales in Eastern Chiapas, upon fleeing estate labour (serf-like labour conditions) and receiving no answer from the government to their requests for land, occupied a settlement that they called San Carlos Nacaxlan.5 While the Tseltal settlers were able to cultivate and live on the land for a short period, by 1839, ladinos with the help of a land surveyor took the land over and had their expropriation of the land legalized retroactively through the passage of laws between 1856-1863 that were responsible for quadrupling the number of registered plantations in Chiapas by 1889.6 More laws 5 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017: pp. 80. Nacaxlan is a word made up of the Tseltal words na and caxlan, meaning house and nonindigenous. “That is, in an attempt to ensure the success of their land claim, they disguised their indigenous identity under the name House of the Kaxlan.” This suggests the awareness of the Tseltal land claimants that their claim was at risk, and that the way to potentially preserve their land claim would be to make it seem as though it was made by nonindigenous land claimants. 6 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: pp. 81. 6 carried out in the late 19th century under the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship “stipulated that the colonization of baldíos (vacant lots) could be carried out by the State or by private companies that were allowed to survey Mexican lands in order to privatize them and sell them.”7 The solidification of estate properties using indentured labour attracted the interest of transnational capital and after the 1880s Chiapas would escalate its estate economy, with different areas and estates producing rubber, cacao, fruits, wood, sugarcane, and coffee.8 By 1910 the percentage of indentured labourers was 92.8 percent of the population.9 Thus, through the 19th century, the state worked in tandem with capitalist interests to dispossess Indigenous communities of their land and to establish businesses profiting off the land through agricultural products and indentured labour. As Maria Teresa Vazquez Castillo notes, the justification that Indigenous land was “not worked” was used to seize the land and grant it to owners that were usually Spaniards.10 Thus, this whole process of land expropriation for privatization was justified by the narrative that seizure of land was needed to enable land to be ‘worked on’ and consequently to be profitable. This brings the history of land in Chiapas to the land reforms inspired in part by the Zapatistas’ namesake, Emiliano Zapata. In Marcos’ written prelude to the 1994 rebellion, “Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds,” he describes how the Zapatistas accuse Carlos Salinas de Gotari (president of Mexico 1988-1994) of having “brought all of the Agrarian Reform gains made under Zapata to an end, of selling the country with the North American Free Trade Agreement, and of bringing Mexico back to the times of Porfirio Díaz.”11 The Zapatistas' use of 7 Castillo, Maria Teresa Vazquez. Land Privatization in Mexico: Urbanization, Formation of Regions, and Globalization in Ejidos. 1st ed. New York: Routledge. 2004. doi:10.4324/9780203327258: pp. 24 8 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017: pp. 82. 9 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: pp. 82. 10 Castillo, Maria Teresa Vazquez. 2004. Land Privatization in Mexico: Urbanization, Formation of Regions, and Globalization in Ejidos. 1st ed. New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203327258: pp. 22 11 Insurgent Subcommander Marcos. "Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds." In Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 19-34. Autonomedia, 1994: pp. 33 7 Zapata as their namesake and Marcos' and the Zapatistas' comparison of the Zapatista struggle to the revolutionary struggle against Díaz demonstrates the importance of the land reform that occurred as a result of the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican Revolution is integral to the story of land struggle in Chiapas. As Mariana Mora contends, “[t]he most significant legacy of the Mexican Revolution for indigenous peoples and peasants was without question Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution.”12 Article 27, established in the Mexican Constitution of 1917 and lasting until the reforms of 1992 that inspired the Zapatista rebellion,13 gave the state the task to reorder territory, making land a “social right to the extent that it allowed for the expropriation of large estates to create ejidos as collective property under the tutelage of the state to be granted to peasant farmers for their use and enjoyment.”14 While ejidos had existed prior to Article 27’s inception, the use of the ejido system in Article 27 was “as a means to expropriate large land holdings, restore land to Indigenous communities, redistribute land to dispossessed rural communities, and to achieve the goal of Zapatistas [meaning the followers of Zapata during the Mexican Revolution]: to award ‘land for those who worked it.’”15 The land reform fought for by Zapata and other Mexican revolutionaries thus found its answer in the post-revolution law of Article 27. Although the ejido system was (eventually) somewhat effective in redistributing land, land redistribution and the general welfare of those to whom land was redistributed were still plagued by a similar denial of land and liberty by state and private sector actors working in 12 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017: pp. 83. 13 Castillo, Maria Teresa Vazquez. Land Privatization in Mexico: Urbanization, Formation of Regions, and Globalization in Ejidos. 1st ed. New York: Routledge. 2004. doi:10.4324/9780203327258: pp. 1, 30-31 14 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017: pp. 83. 15 Castillo, Maria Teresa Vazquez. Land Privatization in Mexico: Urbanization, Formation of Regions, and Globalization in Ejidos. 1st ed. New York: Routledge. 2004. doi:10.4324/9780203327258: pp. 30-31 8 cooperation in the post-revolution era. While the Mexican Revolution had temporarily changed the federal government’s role in land redistribution, the landowning class in Chiapas had maintained government power at the state level (the governor was a landlord)16, and in doing so, used differences in federal and state law to protect their self-interest by limiting land redistribution.17 Given the strength of the Chiapas state elites who controlled both the public and private sector, the expansive granting of ejidos that seemed like it would come from Article 27 did not occur in Chiapas until the 1930s, with the rising Mexican communist and socialist political movements along with the election of President Lázaro Cárdenas who backed them.18 This led first to the amending of laws that local governments had used to limit the implementation of Article 27, and second, to the founding of new ejidos in Chiapas in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.19 Through this same time, however, the newly established ejidos faced difficulties at the hands of the state and landlords that, once again, kept the ejidatarios (those who live in ejidos) in a similar condition to that of the 19th century, despite the creation of Article 27 and the amendments that enabled it. In the ejidos closer to San Cristobal de las Casas, the landowners retained the power to choose the sections of their land they would give up and proceeded to hand over the hectares with the poorest soil.20 Mora argues that this resulted in a situation that parallels the indentured labour of the 19th century, since the best, most fertile land, was still controlled by estate owners, and the Indigenous peasants were still positioned as a temporary labour force, as they were now settled in ejidos surrounding the fertile land, what Chris Hesketh 16 Womack, John, Jr. Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader. New York: New Press, 1999: pp. 8-9 17 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017: pp. 84 18 Womack, John, Jr. Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader. New York: New Press, 1999: pp. 8-9 19 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017: pp. 85 20 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: pp. 84-85 9 calls “dependent spaces”.21 Along with allowing landowners the decision making power to redistribute the land of their choosing, the Mexican government had a key role to play in the transformation of these ejidos from “closed, internally bonded communities into broken, bourgeois-ridden, mistrustful bossdoms.”22 The Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) had set up its first centre for regional development to manage these communities and was originally led by local militant leaders associated with the changes in the 1930s.23 This leadership was eventually ousted in 1954 by the local ladino landowners and the state PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party, the dominant Mexican party at the time) government, as it did not align with their goals.24 The INI consequently became a coopted organization, operating “as a ladino agency of business, corruption, and control of the villages.”25 As a result of this cooptation, the PRI commanded a strong grip on local leadership by the 1970s.26 A similar process occurred in the ejidos further east in Chiapas, although this time without the influence of the INI, as local leaders emerged who without the INI realized they could command more power when they worked in conjunction with the PRI.27 While it is likely clear from the above history, it is worthwhile to emphasize here that the Mexican state’s involvement in the creation and maintenance of ejidos was a form of increased control over territory for the purpose of generating capital. As Hesketh argues, the Mexican state’s territorial policy has been “a process of passive revolution, which has sought to alter social relations and space in a manner more favourable to capital accumulation but which has 21 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: pp. 85; Chris Hesketh, “Producing State Space in Chiapas: Passive Revolution and Everyday Life,” Critical Sociology 42, no. 2 (2016): 211–28, https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920513504604.: pp. 216 22 Womack, John, Jr. Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader. New York: New Press, 1999: pp. 13 23 Womack, John, Jr. Rebellion in Chiapas: pp. 13 24 Womack, John, Jr. Rebellion in Chiapas: pp. 13 25 Womack, John, Jr. Rebellion in Chiapas: pp. 13 26 Womack, John, Jr. Rebellion in Chiapas: pp. 13 27 Womack, John, Jr. Rebellion in Chiapas: pp. 15 10 often come at the expense of incorporating some of the key demands of the subaltern classes.”28 So, while the creation of ejidos was possible because of the state’s legal commitment to redistributing land (as a result of revolutionary demands from subaltern classes for land redistribution), the state’s commitment to territorial political action also produced “tension in the sense that the spaces granted to the indigenous, in which they sought to construct their own political projects, were also spaces that represented the power of the national state in Chiapas.”29 Thus, despite the appearance of increasing communal land in the form of ejidos, by holding the legal power over land redistribution, as well as power over the INI, the Mexican state was “mediating social relations and beginning to play a hegemonic role within Chiapas, seeking to instrumentalize space for its own ends to conform to its overall national project.”30 This was the situation in Chiapas when the stronger push for privatization of the 1980s and 1990s occurred. During this time, the Mexican state began to adopt neoliberal policies that encouraged more privatization and less state involvement in markets. Mexican agribusiness began to have an even greater presence in the late 1980s, with its production aimed at American markets.31 This privatization was increased under the de la Madrid government (1982-88) and was taken up on an increased level with the government of Carlos Salinas de Gotari (1988-1994) and its backing of economic reforms encouraged by the IMF and the World Bank.32 As it relates to the struggle for land in Chiapas, the most important immediate consequence of these neoliberal policies was the amending of Article 27. 28 Chris Hesketh, “Producing State Space in Chiapas: Passive Revolution and Everyday Life,” Critical Sociology 42, no. 2 (2016): 211–28, https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920513504604.: pp. 225 29 Chris Hesketh, “Producing State Space in Chiapas: Passive Revolution and Everyday Life,” Critical Sociology 42, no. 2 (2016): 211–28, https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920513504604.: pp. 217 30 Chris Hesketh, “Producing State Space in Chiapas: Passive Revolution and Everyday Life,”: pp. 218 31 Castillo, Maria Teresa Vazquez. Land Privatization in Mexico: Urbanization, Formation of Regions, and Globalization in Ejidos. 1st ed. New York: Routledge. 2004. doi:10.4324/9780203327258: pp. 37 32 Castillo, Maria Teresa Vazquez. Land Privatization in Mexico: pp. 83-84 11 On February 26th, 1992, the Mexican Congress passed the New Article 27.33 The amendments to the Article that constituted the article being made ‘new’, relieved the state of its responsibility and power to redistribute land and gave ejidatarios the ability to treat ejidos like private property.34 This was done in preparation for the implementation of NAFTA, which required the sort of increasingly privatized economy that was expected of a neoliberal state.35 The passing of the Article 27 amendments were made through coercive government strategy, as the discussions for the amendments took place away from the public eye and only gained peasant support through bribery and threats by the Salinas administration.36 As summarized by Mora, “the ejido [emphasis in original] was essentially transformed from social property to a commodity.”37 Interestingly, during this time, the state sought to change Emiliano Zapata’s symbolism from “land and freedom” to “freedom and rural justice”.38 The state’s attempt to change symbolism to disassociate land with freedom is a fitting representation of the larger government project of directing land to be used in such a way that would make it profitable in the global economy, thus limiting the ability to access communal land and the freedom that came with it. PROCEDE (Programa de Certificación de Derechos Ejidales y Titulación de Solares Urbanos), a program for executing this privatization by creating procedures to decide land titles on previously communal land, was put into action in 1993 as a “development” initiative, and 33 Castillo, Maria Teresa Vazquez. Land Privatization in Mexico: pp. 38 34 Castillo, Maria Teresa Vazquez. Land Privatization in Mexico: Urbanization, Formation of Regions, and Globalization in Ejidos. 1st ed. New York: Routledge. 2004. doi:10.4324/9780203327258: pp. 38 35 Alvaro Reyes and Mara Kaufman, “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, Territory: Zapatista Autonomy and the New Practices of Decolonization” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (2011): 505–25: pp. 518 36 Castillo, Maria Teresa Vazquez. Land Privatization in Mexico: Urbanization, Formation of Regions, and Globalization in Ejidos. 1st ed. New York: Routledge. 2004. doi:10.4324/9780203327258: pp. 40 37 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017: pp. 85 38 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: pp. 116 12 through its 13 years of operation it was responsible for privatizing “28,790 agrarian units in the country, equivalent to 92.24 percent of the total social property.”39 Wrapped up in the state narrative of the Article 27 amendments and PROCEDE was a racist and paternalistic attitude towards Indigenous people that was expressed through the ‘virtues’ of profitable private property. Article 27 was posed as a law that would bring ejidatarios to ‘adulthood’ by modernizing agriculture and integrating them (and the Mexican economy at large) into the global economy, something that, as Castillo notes, possesses a striking similarity to the Díaz dictatorship’s view of Indigenous communal land as a barrier to order.40 For the Mexican government, Indigenous people living on communal land were childlike because they had not accepted the ‘virtues’ of the global economy that could only be realized by the government exerting paternalistic power to privatize their land. This of course, did not consider that the “non-competitive” and “inefficient” agriculture of the ejidos was self-reliant, self-sufficient, and sustainable, nor that the history of ejidos had contributed to the fact that some land was not arable and that there were limited tools to work it.41 Furthermore, one of the objectives of PROCEDE was to improve ejido governance. This objective, as Mora asserts, brings the assumption that the conversion of communal property to private property coincides with the need to enter into new democratic relations in order to protect and profit from that property by facilitating improved relationships with the private sector.42 Thus, the PROCEDE 39 Alvaro Reyes and Mara Kaufman, “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, Territory: Zapatista Autonomy and the New Practices of Decolonization” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (2011): 505–25: pp. 518 40 Castillo, Maria Teresa Vazquez. Land Privatization in Mexico: Urbanization, Formation of Regions, and Globalization in Ejidos. 1st ed. New York: Routledge. 2004. doi:10.4324/9780203327258: pp. 25,38; Alvaro Reyes, “Zapatismo: Other Geographies circa ‘the End of the World,’” Environment and Planning. D, Society & Space 33, no. 3 (2015): 408–24, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815594311.: pp. 413 41 Castillo, Maria Teresa Vazquez. Land Privatization in Mexico: pp. 39 42 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017: pp. 122 13 objective on governance included the embedded assumption that governance of communal land is deficient precisely because it is lacking the sort of democracy enabled by private property. While it may be argued that the neoliberal reforms and the impact on land that they had were a product of the power of international capital, it is important to underline again the role of the state in this process. As the history of Article 27 shows, and as Castillo demonstrates in her argument on this topic, the Mexican state was essential to global capital’s exertion of power over land in Mexico. Like in the 19th century, the Mexican state’s power and cooperation with capital were needed to initiate and execute the privatization of land. As Castillo helpfully clarifies: “The Reforms to Article 27 were part of that program whose main elements were privatization and clarification of property rights… Article 27 was reformed in order to offer cheap land, natural resources, and labor to the global capital that searched for new markets and new spaces of investment. The Mexican State carried out privatizations and modified legislation so that investment could move freely and settle smoothly.”43 Thus, contrary to a view of neoliberalism that understands it as limiting state power, when the Mexican state exerted its power to establish neoliberal reforms, it can be understood to have been exercising its power and influence as it became further intertwined with global capitalism. In my view then, Alvaro Reyes lacks some nuance when he argues that the neoliberal situation is something of a new situation that reduces the state and political class to middle management.44 As the history in this section has exemplified, the state serving the interest of capital has been 43 Castillo, Maria Teresa Vazquez. Land Privatization in Mexico: Urbanization, Formation of Regions, and Globalization in Ejidos. 1st ed. New York: Routledge. 2004 doi:10.4324/9780203327258: pp. 14 44 Alvaro Reyes, “The Zapatista Challenge: Politics after Catastrophe,” Cultural Dynamics 28, no. 2 (2016): 143–68, https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374016641437. Elsewhere (Reyes 2015), Reyes argues that the government reforms to Article 27 represented “a direct attack on the postrevolutionary political status quo that had tenuously reigned in Mexico since 1917.” (pp. 413) While I agree with this argument (as it aligns with the history presented in this thesis), like Reyes’ suggestion that the role of the state in neoliberal governance is unlike its historical role, this argument also seems to imply a sudden direct attack on a “postrevolutionary status quo”, that, as Reyes notes, has had a tenuous reign since its creation. It appears to me that the reforms were a direct attack on the government responsibility to redistribute land and thus, the protection of communal land holdings generally, that has been attacked and limited since its inception. 14 ongoing and while the state may serve in some instances as a manager for capital, this management involves an increase in state power exercised through violence and bureaucracy. Moreover, the state was not just a manager for capital but also merged with capital itself as actors within the state sought to increase their power and enrich themselves through the expansion of private property. The struggle for land in Chiapas from the 19th century to the present has always involved state and capital collaborating to privatize land. This history of the struggle for land in Chiapas by a majority Indigenous population against the collaboration of the Mexican state and capital is what provoked and inspired the 1994 Zapatista rebellion. On the first of January 1994, the EZLN declared war against the Mexican government and took over seven municipalities in Chiapas.45 Upon engaging in a dialogue with the Mexican government later that year, they demanded (among many demands) that NAFTA be revised, that the Mexican government should allow autonomous communities to be established, and that caciques (estate bosses) stop the expulsion of Indigenous people from their communal land.46 Although at first providing what seemed to be a hopeful possibility for reconciliation between the Mexican government and the Zapatistas, dialogue between the two sides was never successful, and from the mid-1990s to the 2019, various levels of autonomy were declared by the Zapatistas without consideration for its recognition by the Mexican state.47 In 2003, autonomy would be most formally introduced in Chiapas with the creation of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno 45 Alvaro Reyes and Mara Kaufman, “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, Territory: Zapatista Autonomy and the New Practices of Decolonization” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (2011): 505–25: pp. 505 46 Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee-General Command [CCRI-CG]. “Communique's Issued During the Dialogue” In Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 233-244. Autonomedia, 1994. 47 Womack, John, Jr. Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader. New York: New Press, 1999: pp. 49; Speed, Shannon. Rights in Rebellion: Indigenous Struggle and Human Rights in Chiapas. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2008: pp. 156; Kampwirth, Karen. Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas. Vol. no. 43. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004: pp. 134; Leonidas Oikonomakis, “Zapatistas announce major expansion of autonomous territories”, ROAR Magazine (August 19, 2019), accessed at: https://roarmag.org/essays/zapatistas-announce-major-expansion-of-autonomous-territories/ 15 (Good Governance Councils) that govern regional groupings of autonomous municipalities (caracoles) in order to coordinate commissions of health, education, and agriculture outside of the domain of the Mexican state.48 The antagonism of the state and capital towards the Zapatista political project often took the form of open violence. While this violence has been present throughout the movement’s history, it transpired with high intensity through the late 1990s, as the Mexican state operated with the objective of creating and supporting military action against the Zapatistas.49 The most notable incident of state-supported violence was the Acteal Massacre in December 1997, which occurred as a paramilitary response to Indigenous declarations of autonomy and fabricated threats of ‘Zapatista violence’ coordinated by local and state government officials and with the support of the state police.50 In the massacre, 45 people were murdered, including “seven men, 20 women (four of them pregnant), and 18 boys and girls (one an infant).”51 The Zapatistas, therefore, needed to create their autonomy and their larger political project in response to the expansive history of land colonization, appropriation, expulsion, and to the continuing violence and economic pressure of the neoliberal state. This history foregrounds the relationship discussed in the following section between Zapatista theory and practice that necessitates territorial autonomy from the state and capital. 48 Mariana Mora, “Zapatista Anticapitalist Politics and the ‘Other Campaign’: Learning from the Struggle for Indigenous Rights and Autonomy,” Latin American Perspectives 34, no. 2 (2007): 64–77.:pp. 69; Benjamin Maldonado. “Introduction” In Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magón Reader. 2015 ed, (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), https://go.exlibris.link/XGVRSJRW.: pp. 14 49 Carlos Marín, “Plan del Ejército en Chiapas, desde 1994: crear bandas paramilitares, desplazar a la población, destruir las bases de apoyo del EZLN…” Proceso, No. 1105 (January 4, 1998), 6–11, https://ratical.org/ratville/ArmyPlan94on.html. 50 Womack, John, Jr. Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader. New York: New Press, 1999: pp. 342-347 51 Womack, John, Jr. Rebellion in Chiapas: pp. 347 16 The Mexican government’s actions throughout the history discussed in this section resembles the Lockean argument that private property is a natural right of human existence that is achieved through the “subduing and improving” of the land that must be secured by government.52 In Locke’s argument, government is formed as a consequence of the need of property owners in the state of nature to secure their property by authorizing the sovereign power of a central decision maker.53 Once this sovereign power has been established, one can only take inheritance of land by submitting to the state that claims power over that land, since Locke argues that to inherit land, one must submit to the original conditions that accompanied the inherited property.54 Importantly, Locke also clearly states that the sovereignty of common-wealths is territorial in nature, as they do not allow for their land to be “dismembered”.55 In this way, a government with the purpose of protecting private property is given that power of protection through the establishment of sovereign authority over the territory it claims. The Mexican government evokes this Lockean argument through their expropriation of Indigenous land with the justification that the land was not being used productively. Furthermore, the Mexican government follows Locke’s argument in its characterization of Indigenous land as being wasted due to a lack of private-property style land cultivation.56 Communal land holdings such as those established by the original Article 27 and by Zapatista action are thus contrary to the Lockean logic of land and property and, in the Lockean argument, must be transformed into private property. The Mexican state passing laws which allowed the ladinos to overtake San Carlos Nacaxlan, changing Article 27 to privatize ejidos, and engaging in 52John Locke. C. B. Macpherson, eds. Second Treatise of Government, 1st ed. Indianapolis, Ind: Hackett Pub. Co, 1980: pp. 18-30, 65-68 53 John Locke. C. B. Macpherson, eds. Second Treatise of Government: pp. 16 54 John Locke. C. B. Macpherson, eds. Second Treatise of Government: pp. 40 55 John Locke. C. B. Macpherson, eds. Second Treatise of Government: pp. 62-63 56 John Locke. C. B. Macpherson, eds. Second Treatise of Government: pp. 18-30 17 violent opposition against the Zapatistas in coordination with local landowners, puts into practice Locke’s assertion that the “great and chief-end [emphasis in original]” of organizing society into government is to preserve private property.57 Communal landholdings run contrary to a form of sovereign control that is predicated on protecting and ruling over a relation to land that is an individual (private) relation rather than one held in common. As Paul Nadasny argues, “it is from that state context [sovereign state jurisdiction] that they [property relations] derive their force and meaning”.58 Indeed, if the state exists to govern private property, and private property attains force and meaning through the state, property held in common is illegible to its forms of control that demand unity under a sovereign decision-maker and will therefore be unacceptable to the aspiring sovereign power. Thus, the history outlined in this section demonstrates that the collaboration of the Mexican state and capital enforces the Lockean concept of government as the sovereign guarantor of private property, and therefore, freedom (since in the Lockean conception, freedom is essentially connected to the ownership of private property). As the Zapatista Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee-General Command (CCRI-CG) recognized in 1994, “[t]he struggle of the workers for organizational independence has revealed the triple alliance between the evil government, the corrupt leaders, and the powerful men of money.”59 57 John Locke. C. B. Macpherson, eds. Second Treatise of Government: pp. 18-30, 65-68 58 Paul Nadasdy, Sovereignty’s Entailments: First Nation State Formation in the Yukon, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487515720.: pp. 89 59 Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee-General Command [CCRI-CG]. “To the Workers of the Republic” In Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 285-287. Autonomedia, 1994. 18 3: The Zapatista political philosophy of power to be and territorial autonomy The history outlined in the previous section plays a central role in the political philosophy of the Zapatistas for two reasons. First, to understand why the Zapatistas reject both the state and capitalism, one must understand the history of how the theory of freedom as ownership of private property secured by a sovereign government has been and continues to be forcefully promoted by the Mexican state and capital. Since this theory of freedom (as private property) is incompatible with the Zapatista political philosophy of power to be that I explain in this section, it was necessary for the forces (the Mexican state and capital) that were promoting it to be opposed by the Zapatistas if they wanted to exercise their freedom. Second, the reciprocal theory-practice political philosophy of power to be is inseparable from the historical circumstances from which it emerged. Since the Zapatista political philosophy is essentially connected to the practical resistance to the Mexican state and capital, one needs to understand the history to understand the theory and practice. To achieve freedom, the Zapatistas needed to practically oppose the state and capital and their combined initiatives to impose private property over communally held land. Power to be, as a political project created through a reciprocal relationship between theory and practice, reflects and informs that necessity. This section is divided into two subsections. In the first subsection I define and explain power to be as a descriptor of the Zapatista political philosophy that claims a way of life that is crucially connected to a reciprocal relation to land. I then draw out the idea of power to be as a living power that severs sovereign statist command-obedience through a discussion on the similarity of power to be and theories of power as potentia. In the section subsection I begin by explaining power to be’s reciprocal relationship with territorial autonomy (each enables the other) and by outlining what Zapatista territorial autonomy looks like in practice. Following that 19 explanation, I clarify how Zapatista territorial autonomy diverges from a sovereign statist notion of territory and interrupts capitalist organization of territory by disrupting state boundaries, bypassing the state in engaging in mutual aid with solidarity networks, and calling for overlapping authority. I conclude this section by arguing that power to be refuses both the relation to land and the relation between state authority and land of Locke’s political theory and by responding to the counterargument that the state is capable of eliminating private property. 3.1 Power to be and potentia What then, is power to be and how is territorial autonomy an essential part of it? I use power to be as the descriptor for the Zapatista political philosophy because it is a term that has already been used by scholars of this philosophy to describe it, and because I believe it is the best fit for describing the theory and practice of the Zapatista political project. The term power to be comes from Mariana Mora’s translation and interpretation of Tseltal scholar Juan López Intzín’s concept of poder ser, or “‘el poder sentirsaber-sentirpensar’ (the power or ability to feel-know and to feel-think)”60 Power to be is the act of living and of claiming a way of living that is intended to maintain biological and sociocultural life.61 This is inseparable from a connection to land. This connection to land is seen through power to be’s inspiration by the Tseltal term lekil kuxlejal and the Tojolabal equivalent sak’aniltik, which mean: “a daily aspiration to live in a dignified manner”.62 The dignified or good life referred to here is importantly not just a way of living between human beings but also between human beings and land.63 This relationship 60 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017: pp. 19 61 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: pp. 19-20 62 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: pp. 19 63 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: pp. 19 20 between humans and land in lekil kuxlejal and sak’aniltik is a social relation. The relationship to land that creates a dignified life is social (and thus communal), since the land nurtures a society rather than individuals, and by doing so, operates in a reciprocal relationship with those who live on it. The political practices of the Zapatista communities, of kuxlejal politics and the power to be, reproduce not only their own lives and practices on the land, but with the land, as the communal connection extends community to the land. In resisting the imposition of private property, the Zapatistas claim their oppositional power to be as something that they enact in their way of life while reaching out to a future where it can be fully enacted.64 Crucially, this requires the cultivation and maintenance of the land, as “[w]orking communal land is what connects the individual to political participation, not the acquisition of a property title; it is what links kuxlejal as social-territorial “life-existence” to the political.”65 Power to be can be understood to be related to the concept of potentia. As Shannon Speed argues, the Zapatistas are interested in power as “potentia, power constituted through the creative force of social struggle, not potestas, constituted power in the form of a new sovereign.”66 A similar concept of power as potentia can be identified when describing how women in the Zapatista communities claim their rights against potential discrimination within the social movement. Zapatista women organized internally to fight for their rights and for the creation of the Women’s Revolutionary Laws (laws to be practiced within the revolutionary movement), making their claims in opposition to both men in their communities and to an individual rights framework that attempted to frame collective rights as a threat to feminism.67 64 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017: pp. 233 65 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: pp. 144 66 Speed, Shannon. Rights in Rebellion: Indigenous Struggle and Human Rights in Chiapas. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2008: pp. 168-169 67 Speed, Shannon. Rights in Rebellion: Indigenous Struggle and Human Rights in Chiapas. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2008: pp. 123-125; Insurgent Subcommander Marcos. “On Misunderstandings about the 21 The organization and reading of women’s demands by Susana (a Tsotsil woman and member of the Zapatistas) is referred to as the first EZLN uprising by Marcos, as it was an uprising within the uprising that transformed the social conditions within the communities of the movement. It was the women’s internal social struggle, rather than a top-down decision that propelled feminism within the Zapatistas. Marina Sitrin also associates the sort of power used in the Zapatista movement with the idea of a living power as potentia, created and used through practice.68 Similarly, Antonio Negri argues that the radical pluralism in what he calls constituent power breaks down the unity required for sovereignty and leaves those acting with constituent power the task of “inventing new, non-sovereign institutions” through the use of something quite similar to living power: “the revolutionary process as an open and plural machine that progressively produces its norms.”69 While they do not call it potentia or constituent power, Reyes and Kaufman can be understood to be arguing for the Zapatistas as one of many possible inventors of non-sovereign institutions as they identify the same features of living power present in power to be in the Zapatista movement and argue that the Zapatista social organization is one “that completely bypasses the sovereign and its necessary relation of command obedience…[and] draws on the community practices of self-organization through assembly that tendentially disperse power.”70 Despite his argument against the possibility for potentia to exist without some sort of potestas (for Dussel, potestas is EZLN and the Real First Uprising” In Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 108-112. Autonomedia, 1994.; Kampwirth, Karen. Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas. Vol. no. 43. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004: pp. 164 68 Sitrin, Marina. Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina. 1st ed. New York: Zed Books, 2012. 69 Antonio Negri, The End of Sovereignty, trans. Ed Emery, (Newark: Polity Press, 2022).: pp. 67, 65 [page 67 for the former quotation, page 65 for the latter] 70 Alvaro Reyes and Mara Kaufman, “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, Territory: Zapatista Autonomy and the New Practices of Decolonization” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (2011): 505–25. pp: 515-516 22 defined by organization, leadership, and institutionalization rather than sovereignty, and can be transformed through the “anti-power” of hyper-potentia), Enrique Dussel also understands the Zapatistas as taking part in a liberation praxis which is a construction of power below, “as it is the action of subjects who have become the actors who build the new structure of politics on the basis of a new political ‘culture.’”71 Furthermore, Dussel theorizes the ‘taking’ of power as the transformation of institutions (through hyper-potentia) that have become fetishized rather than the adoption of corrupted (or fetishized) institutions.72 Thus, the theory of power and freedom at the core of power to be can be seen through this extended discussion on its meaning to be always in construction through practice yet always connected to two core principles. First, as Marcos says, power is not to be taken,73 it is something that transforms the possibilities for society beyond the style of the commanding power typical of sovereign states as social movements use it in unique ways. Second, claiming power to be does not just involve any individual desire of what one is or would like to be, but instead requires a collective pursuit of a dignified life through the continuation of communal practices and work on the land. Living on and working the land in this way with others provides freedom by sustenance and by preventing outside oppression. 71 Enrique D. Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822389446.: pp. 19-21, 81, 95-99, 106; Enrique Dussel, “From Fraternity to Solidarity: Toward a Politics of Liberation”, Journal of Social Philosophy 38, no. 1 (2007): 73–92, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00367.x.: pp. 87 72 Enrique D. Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822389446.: pp. 131-132. While Dussel’s position outlines the connection of the Zapatistas to potentia in the ways outlined above, his insistence on institutions that do not corrupt and for potentia’s uselessness without potestas (arguments he makes in noted opposition to anarchist ideas: pages 20, 131) appears to have some tension with how the Zapatistas view institutions and how the other scholars mentioned here have defined potentia. 73 Aguilera, Eugenio, Hernández, Ana Laura, Rodríguez, Gustavo, and Devereaux, Pablo Salazar. “Interview with Subcommander Marcos” In Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 294-316. Autonomedia, 1994: pp. 304; Insurgent Subcommander Marcos. “We are Invincible. We Cannot, We do not Deserve to Lose” In Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 120-123. Autonomedia, 1994: pp. 120 23 3.2 Power to be and territorial autonomy Through this explanation of the Zapatista political philosophy as power to be and its two principles outlining its understandings of freedom and power, the importance of land to this philosophy becomes clear. With power to be, freedom and the practice of alternative forms of social organization are only possible through communal land. As Gustavo Esteva argues, the Zapatistas understand territory as coming with “responsibility over nature and society. Occupation is not equivalent to ownership… [this understanding of territory] prevents them from conceiving the possibility of appropriating it in an exclusive way… they allocate lands to their members, without transforming it into private property.”74 While it may simply be a difference in choice of language, it is worth pointing out a potential issue with Esteva’s characterization of the Zapatista understanding of territory as having a responsibility over nature and society. In my understanding of power to be, the responsibility towards land and society is a responsibility with. In a responsibility with nature and society, the communal land is worked on to achieve communal freedom by sustaining the land and the relationships in society that revolve around the land. Thus, for power to be to be exercised fully, there must be some insurance that land can be used communally, and that power can be used to transform society rather than to take hold of it. This insurance comes by way of territorial autonomy. Territorial autonomy provides the foundation for power to be while also being constructed by power to be. The circularity here is a product of the reciprocal nature of power to be. The theory-practice relationship in power to be is reciprocal in that both the theory and practice are never fully complete and continue to inform each other as more practicing and theorizing occurs. Furthermore, because of this reciprocal relationship, the theory and practice involved in power to be cannot be realized without each 74 Gustavo Esteva, “The Zapatistas and People’s Power,” Capital & Class 23, no. 2 (1999): 153–182: pp. 165 24 other. It is through the claiming of a dignified life by exercising power to be that territorial autonomy is established, and it is through the access to land and governance practices enabled by territorial autonomy that power to be (and thus the claiming of a dignified life on communal land) can continue to be exercised. Thus, territorial autonomy is essential to power to be and the Zapatista political project in general. While the above explanation provides an understanding of why territorial autonomy is a crucial component of power to be, it does not describe exactly what Zapatista territorial autonomy is and how it provides access to land and governance practices that enable power to be. As Mora argues and as the previous paragraph indicates, for the Zapatistas “[t]he notion of territory in itself needs to be understood as creating a sense of collective belonging in a particular locality as a central aspirational element for lekil kuxlejal [emphasis in original].”75 This territorial autonomy occurred primarily through the Zapatista creation of five caracoles76 (regional zones) separate from the influence of the Mexican government that encompass councils of self-government and autonomous municipalities that manage Zapatista communities and 75 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017: pp. 144 76 One may be confused as to why the name of autonomous regions (caracoles) translates to ‘snail’, ‘shell’, ‘spiral’, or ‘conch shell’. The reason for this name is worth mentioning as it is in-keeping with the themes of this thesis. This is a direct reference to “the conch shell used to convoke communal assemblies since pre-Columbian times.” (Lightning Collective 2022, xxix) Beyond the direct reference however, Subcommandante Marcos has described that, in Mayan tradition, the carcol represents knowledge both entering and leaving an individual who is able to share that knowledge with others (even those who are distant) for the purpose of fostering agreement (Lightning Collective 2022, xxix). As for the ‘spiral’ translation, Marcos has also explained the caracoles “as spirals that open to the outside world and through which the outside world can know the Zapatistas.” (Ross 2005, 39). One also can find Zapatista art of a snail in a Zapatista balaclava with the words “lento, pero avanzo” (slow but forward/advancing). This may be a reference to the speed with which the caracoles make decisions by consensus or even to the speed that Zapatistas progress with against their obstacles (potentially as compared to the faster speed of capitalism and globalization). I cannot verify this last meaning with certainty however, since, besides a short mention in a web article from a Stanford archaeology lab, I have not found mention of this meaning in my research.; John Ross, “Celebrating the Caracoles: Step by Step, the Zapatistas Advance on the Horizon,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 29, no. 1 (2005): 39–46.; Subcommandante Marcos and Lightning Collective, Zapatista Stories for Dreaming An-Other World, trans. Lightning Collective, (Oakland: PM Press, 2022). 25 provide services detached from those provided by the government.77 As Reyes and Kaufman argue, the autonomous territory is an escape and a shelter from the results of land privatization and the exploitation of labour and land.78 Furthermore, it creates the base on which a new collective can be created, sustained, and self-governed.79 This is not an attempt at creating some kind of new sovereignty in an effort to secede and create a new nation. Rather, it is an attempt at eschewing a sovereign relation by rejecting the condition of enclosure and singular command that create it.80 This rejection of (sovereign) statist territorial enclosure requires some further explanation since it raises the question of how Zapatista territorial autonomy is different from the sovereign state notion of territory. If political engagement between Indigenous peoples and the sovereign state requires Indigenous peoples to “conform to the cultural entailments of sovereignty”81, how does the territorial autonomy of the Zapatistas deviate from a (sovereign) statist notion of territory? While there are deviations between Zapatista territorial autonomy and a (sovereign) statist notion of territory that I outline below, it is important to briefly note that the Zapatistas—partially because they must reject the state—are unable (and perhaps unwilling) to fully separate themselves from every kind of territorial practice that resembles those of the state. For example, the marking of autonomous zone borders, while being on one hand a rejection of Mexican state 77 Alvaro Reyes and Mara Kaufman, “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, Territory: Zapatista Autonomy and the New Practices of Decolonization” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (2011): 505–25. pp: 516; Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017: pp. 6 78 Alvaro Reyes and Mara Kaufman, “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, Territory: Zapatista Autonomy and the New Practices of Decolonization” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (2011): 505–25. pp: 519 79 Alvaro Reyes and Mara Kaufman, “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, Territory”. pp: 519 80 Alvaro Reyes and Mara Kaufman, “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, Territory”: pp: 513,506,519 81 Paul Nadasdy, Sovereignty’s Entailments: First Nation State Formation in the Yukon, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487515720.: pp. 3-19 26 sovereignty, is on the other hand the creation of boundaries that partially resembles those of the state.82 The absence of complete separation between state and non-state political organization should not give one the idea that Zapatista territorial autonomy is insignificant in its deviations from the sovereign state notion of territory. Given that “[t]he establishment and maintenance of clear boundaries both among and within states is essential to the concept of the modern state and to the exercise of state power”83, the most obvious deviation between Zapatista territorial autonomy and statist sovereign territorial authority is that the Zapatistas do their best not to adhere to state-like boundaries. As I have argued, the autonomous territory rejects the enclosure typical of the sovereign state by creating a self-governed territory within it that is also the basis for rejecting the singular command of the Mexican state, as services are established on it that replace those ordinarily provided by the government. To use Anna Jurkevics’ terminology, as the Zapatistas claim autonomous territory for the use and self-governance of those who live on it and “engage with transnational activist networks”84 with representatives from Greece, Denmark, Catalonia, U.S.A, Argentina, Ecuador, Italy, and all over Mexico (who engage in mutual aid with the Zapatistas through clinics, bike repairs shops, and more),85 they “fracture [emphasis in 82 I would still argue that this constitutes the fracturing of sovereignty more than it does the establishment of new sovereignty, since these new boundaries are required to break the enclosure and command-obedience of the state discussed previously. However, pointing out that practices resembling the state (and articulated with and against the state) are present in the Zapatista movement is important to dispel the problematic notion that certain ways of being are exclusive to either state or non-state societies (Nadasny 2017, 310). That said (and as Nadasny argues throughout Sovereignty’s Entailments), certain ways of being can thrive in something that is closer to a non-state society in ways they would be unable to in state societies. 83 Paul Nadasdy, Sovereignty’s Entailments: First Nation State Formation in the Yukon, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487515720.: pp. 93 84 Anna Jurkevics, “Land Grabbing and the Perplexities of Territorial Sovereignty,” Political Theory 50, no. 1 (2022): 32–58, https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211008591.: pp. 53 85 John Ross, “Celebrating the Caracoles: Step by Step, the Zapatistas Advance on the Horizon,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 29, no. 1 (2005): 39–46.: pp. 45 27 original] sovereignty by reclaiming land control for occupants against the state’s unilateral claim.”86 Furthermore, the fracturing of sovereignty through a call for overlapping authority can be seen prominently in the Zapatista movement as early as 1994. Before the Zapatistas had fully abandoned potential cooperation with the Mexican government, they outlined their desires for autonomy as autonomous yet not separatist, as they advocated for self-governance within a radically re-organized Mexico. In sharp opposition to the Mexican state’s proposal of self-government overseen by the state, the Zapatista proposal rallied against centralism and raised the idea that autonomy could be applied to almost every political or social grouping within the country.87 While the Zapatistas did not see this as a contradiction—they were suggesting a radically different political system—what they were proposing was contrary to the purported absolute control of the state itself. Of course, the state and the Zapatistas never came to an agreement. The CCRI-CG response to the failed negotiations demonstrates that the Zapatista proposals (that they would eventually enact themselves, most prominently in the establishing of the caracoles in 2003) were dismissed by the state for the obvious disruption they would have caused to its sovereignty (territorially and jurisdictionally). In this response, the CCRI-CG state that, in the negotiations, the government tried to “leave intact the centralist power structure that magnifies the power of the federal executive in a dictatorial manner. The demand for the 86 Anna Jurkevics, “Land Grabbing and the Perplexities of Territorial Sovereignty,” Political Theory 50, no. 1 (2022): 32–58, https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211008591.: pp. 53-54 87 Aguilera, Eugenio, Hernández, Ana Laura, Rodríguez, Gustavo, and Devereaux, Pablo Salazar. “Interview with Subcommander Marcos” In Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 294-316. Autonomedia, 1994.: pp. 302-303; Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee-General Command [CCRI-CG]. “Communique's Issued During the Dialogue” In Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 233-244. Autonomedia, 1994. 28 autonomy of the townships [in the negotiations] was tossed aside [by the government].”88 Thus, while the Zapatistas do not break away from every aspect of the notion of statist territorial authority, their territorial autonomy resists the territorial enclosure of the state, claims land for those who live on it, bypasses the state in engaging in mutual aid with transnational activist networks, and proposes a radical system of overlapping authority that has the consequence of seriously disturbing the ability to control the territory and people it claims sovereignty over. Reyes also identifies the role that territorial autonomy plays in rejecting the influence of capitalism by arguing that if capitalism is understood to organize territory in order to continue functioning, the reorganization of territory “can within limited spaces in the here and now eliminate those social relations that sustain the production of abstract wealth as such.”89 Here again then, the Zapatistas resist the connection between private property and sovereignty outlined in the discussion on Locke and echoed in Nadasny’s study of sovereignty and state formation in which he describes that a shared assumption of First Nation state building was integration into “private capital markets”.90 As the history in the previous section shows, capitalism (in collaboration with the state) can be understood to organize territory to continue its functioning. Thus, as Reyes argues, with their territorial reorganization, the Zapatistas provide an example “that the practical recuperation of an anti-capitalist present must build upon the project of a conscious structural respatialization, a non-separatist territorial imperative.”91 The Zapatistas 88 Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee-General Command [CCRI-CG]. “On the Zapatista Response to the Peace Accord Proposals” In Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 330-337. Autonomedia, 1994.: pp. 333 89 Alvaro Reyes, “The Zapatista Challenge: Politics after Catastrophe,” Cultural Dynamics 28, no. 2 (2016): 143–68: pp. 162-163 90 Paul Nadasdy, Sovereignty’s Entailments: First Nation State Formation in the Yukon, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487515720.: pp. 37, 51, 64 91 Alvaro Reyes, “The Zapatista Challenge: Politics after Catastrophe,”: pp. 162 29 thus create territorial autonomy by engaging in the project of respatialization through power to be. The political philosophy of power to be therefore provides a theory of territory and freedom that entirely rejects the centrality of private property put forward by the Lockean theory of private property that can also be seen in the actions of the Mexican state. The Zapatistas, using power to be, practice this rejection by building their theory alongside its practice of rebellion against the state of Mexico that, as argued previously, attempts to establish private property to achieve something resembling a Lockean version of freedom. For Locke, one has a natural right to possess power over land (as property) which requires the property holder to subdue and improve it.92 In the Lockean understanding, the natural world is given to men in common by God, but individual labour on the land is what privatizes it.93 This right is then secured by government, which is formed and made sovereign to protect this natural right against possible intrusions against it that could occur in the state of nature.94 Importantly for Locke, money is used to trade goods, a process that allows for larger private property since money cannot spoil and the spoilage of goods is grounds to revoke private property.95 This creates the conditions for large land holdings on which money can be used to pay for the labour of those working on it despite those labourers not being the property owners. Although power to be shares with Locke’s philosophy the idea that freedom is achieved through labour, the relation of labour to land in power to be is dramatically divergent from Locke’s theory on labour and private property. In power to be, a communal relationship with the 92 John Locke. C. B. Macpherson, eds. Second Treatise of Government, 1st ed. Indianapolis, Ind: Hackett Pub. Co, 1980: pp. 20-21 93 John Locke. C. B. Macpherson, eds. Second Treatise of Government: pp. 21-25 94 John Locke. C. B. Macpherson, eds. Second Treatise of Government: pp. 16, 65-68 95 John Locke. C. B. Macpherson, eds. Second Treatise of Government: pp. 28-30 30 land is claimed and practiced against the system of private property surrounding it and being enforced upon it. This involves labouring in common with others to preserve the land as something that the Zapatistas are in relation with. This is clearly opposed to the Lockean idea that individual labour over land turns it into the possession of the individual mixing their labour with the land. Asserting one’s power to be is something done socially and as described previously, through various responsibilities of labour and self-governance. The assertion of power to be found its realization in the initial occupation of around 12 percent of the land in the state of Chiapas by the Zapatistas.96 Moreover, Locke’s spoilage proviso that argues one’s right to private property ceases if they allow the land (or whatever they cultivate on it) to spoil, rather than limiting the expansion of private property, causes Locke to find his justification for expanded private property in the exchange of goods. This ‘spoilage proviso’ is challenged by Zapatista practices of relations with the land since the Zapatistas are primarily interested in sustaining the land and themselves, and not having an excess of goods to exchange on the market.97 The Zapatistas defy the neoliberal logic that human prosperity occurs by using land for increased ‘productivity’ through their vehement rejection of NAFTA. The supposed efficiency and productivity brought by NAFTA is essentially tied to the use of land for private rather than communal purposes. Some who find similar issues with the Lockean theory that links private property with freedom that I have in this thesis may make the argument that the state is capable of eliminating private property. They may critique the Zapatista political project and its response to arguments 96 Alvaro Reyes and Mara Kaufman, “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, Territory: Zapatista Autonomy and the New Practices of Decolonization” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (2011): 505–25: pp. 518 97 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017: pp. 19 31 on freedom and private property by arguing that the state has simply been subordinated to the interests of capital, and as a result, this thesis’ argument overstates the role of the state in maintaining and expanding private property. What follows from this argument is that a state can exist that is not subordinated to the interests of capital or that is uninterested in exercising and expanding its power through the capitalist economy. What this argument does not seem to properly appreciate, and what it must respond to, is the argument that state power cannot be separated from capitalism. As Reyes and Arturo Escobar separately argue, the new left across Latin America, which had initially hoped to use state power to harness global capitalism and use it to boost social welfare, was not able to build a new political project due to the conditions of neoliberalism which requires “further rationalizing long-standing forms of territoriality in terms of pre-constituted political divisions.”98 Reyes goes on to argue that, in fact, the mediation of the state over economic affairs, rather than preventing a further descent into a neoliberal world, has contributed to neoliberal capitalism since “the primary redoubt of warlords and thieves is exactly the contemporary capitalist state”.99 The problem goes beyond what Reyes identifies in the contemporary state, however. As the history outlined in this thesis shows, as what is understood as a modern or contemporary state began to solidify, state-building itself occurred through the colonization, privatization, and exploitation of land supported by a blurry combination of state and private actors. The colonial state relies on capitalism to motivate settlement and exploitation. Capitalism relies on the 98 Alvaro Reyes, “The Zapatista Challenge: Politics after Catastrophe,” Cultural Dynamics 28, no. 2 (2016): 143–68: pp. 144,158,163; Alvaro Reyes, “Zapatismo: Other Geographies circa ‘the End of the World,’” Environment and Planning. D, Society & Space 33, no. 3 (2015): 408–24, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815594311.: pp. 418; Arturo Escobar, “Latin America at a Crossroads,” Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 1–65, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380903424208.: pp. 41-42 99 Alvaro Reyes, “The Zapatista Challenge: Politics after Catastrophe,” Cultural Dynamics 28, no. 2 (2016): 143–68: pp. 144,158,163 32 colonial state to use its coercive violent and legal power to carry out a nationalizing project that places land and the people on that land within the bounds of colonial state control and thus (at the same time) subjects them to the accompanying capitalist privatization. The state therefore seems fundamentally incapable of facilitating an adequate opposition to the project of freedom by private property, whereas Zapatista power to be and its territorial autonomy are capable of doing so precisely as a consequence of their eschewing of state-like qualities. A similar critique is dealt with excellently by Marina Sitrin. Sitrin responds to James Petras’ argument against what he calls anti-power movements (a category the Zapatistas would be placed into). Petras’ concern is that movements that do not seek power are limited because there is little potential for their mobilization into any kind of state power.100 As Sitrin identifies, Petras frames the goal of social movements as something entirely different to how ‘anti-power’ social movements understand themselves.101 Marcos has specifically argued that the Zapatistas “cannot replicate the same logic as the government… We cannot reverse this logic and say that now the Zapatista vision is going to be imposed on the people with the weapons of the Zapatista Army. We are saying ‘Let’s destroy this state, this state system.’”102 For Marcos, Petras would be represented in “all of the orthodox leftists and of the old dinosaurs” that promote a single-party led revolutionary vanguard while rejecting the value of a movement that orients itself away and against the state.103 The goal of ‘anti-power’ movements is to create something 100 Sitrin, Marina. Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina. 1st ed. New York: Zed Books, 2012: pp. 109-111 101 Sitrin, Marina. Everyday Revolutions: pp. 111 102 Aguilera, Eugenio, Hernández, Ana Laura, Rodríguez, Gustavo, and Devereaux, Pablo Salazar. “Interview with Subcommander Marcos” In Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 294-316. Autonomedia, 1994.: pp. 304 103 Aguilera, Eugenio, Hernández, Ana Laura, Rodríguez, Gustavo, and Devereaux, Pablo Salazar. “Interview with Subcommander Marcos” In Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 294-316. Autonomedia, 1994.: pp. 306 33 transformative, but to do so in a way that leaves an intentional gap or destruction of the sovereignty and state-led obedience that is often thought to be essential for political action. This goal is outlined in Reyes and Kaufman’s description of Zapatista territorial sovereignty as “the practical and tendential unmaking of sovereignty… that makes possible the creation and everyday maintenance of an intricate system for the development of what the Zapatistas have termed ‘autonomy.’ ”104 Similarly, as Sitrin argues: “This does not mean that the [‘anti-power’] movements do not want to replace the state with something else, only that they do not want to use old and tired forms and tools of change, taking existing institutions of power and merely changing the individuals that constitute them.”105 Power to be thus reconceptualizes the horizon of goals for transforming society by enacting that transformation and modifying it as the transformation continues. Power to be and its claim to social transformation without taking power is well-put by Eduardo Galeano (as quoted in Sitrin), who writes, “I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking.”106 The Zapatista territorial autonomy could never have created stringent conditions for a solidified vision of an ideal society because it was created to maintain a process of walking towards a future that is continuously being destroyed and rebuilt. 104 Alvaro Reyes and Mara Kaufman, “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, Territory: Zapatista Autonomy and the New Practices of Decolonization” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (2011): 505–25. pp: 506 105 Sitrin, Marina. Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina. 1st ed. New York: Zed Books, 2012: pp. 111-112 106 Sitrin, Marina. Everyday Revolutions: pp. 62. Galeano is also making an important point here about what it means to engage in prefigurative politics. It may be argued that those participating in prefigurative politics lose something of their end goal by taking smaller steps to reach those goals in the present. However, if one understands those goals as something that changes as society is prefigured, the importance and meaning that is placed in utopia changes. 34 4: Anarchism and Self-affirmative praxis in conversation with the Zapatistas and Power to be: Noting Divergence and Attempted Subsumption, and Moving Towards Solidarity In this section, I begin by examining the tendency for (some) anarchists to attempt to subsume the Zapatistas under their political banner. Next, I compare Anarchist thought and practice—from European anarchists Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta to the Mexican Anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón—to the Zapatistas in order to elucidate why exactly the Zapatistas are not anarchists and do not consider themselves to be anarchists. I then draw on Richard J.F. Day’s argument on hegemony and affinity to argue that there is a pathway towards solidarity between anarchists and the Zapatistas that can be advanced through the creation of many different anarchistic (not Anarchist!), non-totalized struggles. Finally, I argue that this pathway to solidarity can be found in the work of Glen Coulthard and Taiaiake Alfred. Anarchism may be argued to be a political theory with an obvious resemblance to the Zapatistas and power to be. That both political philosophies advocate for the rejection of the state and the facilitation of production outside of capitalism makes a comparison between the two worth exploring. However, the Zapatistas do not consider themselves to be anarchists. In response to an argument made that the Zapatistas are not anarchists, in 2002 a letter sent to the Anarchist periodical Green Anarchy by an unnamed Zapatista author criticized and condemned the condescension of anarchists who acted as though they had the authority to dictate the label of the Zapatistas (a movement with its own unique history grounded in struggling against colonialism) and who suggested intervening in the movement to further ends that were more explicitly Anarchist.107 The Zapatista response powerfully stated: “So long as North American anarchists hold and espouse colonialist belief systems they will forever find themselves without 107 Anonymous Zapatista Member, “A Zapatista Response to ‘The EZLN is NOT Anarchist,’” The Deep Commons (2022), https://www.deepcommons.net/post/a-zapatista-response-to-the-ezln-is-not-anarchist-1. 35 allies in the third world.”108 In a 1994 interview with several interviewers, one of whom was a journalist for a Mexican anarchist magazine, Subcommandante Marcos playfully dodged the question of if the Zapatistas were anarchists. Responding in a roundabout way (part of his response is the epigraph to this thesis), Marcos gave his history of coming to the Zapatista movement with theories of revolution that resembled Marxist-Leninism and being confronted by the practical reality of the Indigenous peoples of Chiapas.109 For Marcos, this confrontation shows why the Zapatistas are Zapatistas rather than a group that can be subsumed under any other name or ideology. Furthermore, this confrontation prompted the position of the Zapatistas against state power and thus against what Marcos calls “the orthodox leftists [here he is referring to Trotskyists and Maoists] and of the old dinosaurs” who critique the anti-state power position of the Zapatistas.110 While theoretically this may be understood to point the Zapatistas in the direction of Anarchism, as this indicates Zapatista opposition to left wing political philosophies that want to reclaim state power, I understand it as an assertion that Zapatista rebellion and resistance are derived in large part from Indigenous theories and practices, rather than being strictly a product of Marxist-Leninism, Anarchism, or any other left-wing ideology. This does not mean that these political philosophies do not share similarities, but rather, that subsuming the Zapatistas under the label of Anarchism does not capture the theory and practice that have been crafted by the Zapatistas and their unique history, ideas, practices, and influences. This does not mean that the similarities between the Zapatistas and anarchists should not be noted. In The Conquest of Bread, Peter Kropotkin, arguing that each person has the right to 108 Anonymous Zapatista Member, “A Zapatista Response to ‘The EZLN is NOT Anarchist,’” 109 Aguilera, Eugenio, Hernández, Ana Laura, Rodríguez, Gustavo, and Devereaux, Pablo Salazar. “Interview with Subcommander Marcos” In Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 294-316. Autonomedia, 1994: pp. 300 110 Aguilera, Eugenio, Hernández, Ana Laura, Rodríguez, Gustavo, and Devereaux, Pablo Salazar. “Interview with Subcommander Marcos”: pp. 304-306 36 live, explains a similar concept to power to be. For Kropotkin, the right to live means that each person has a right to share in society’s means of existence.111 The right to live is enacted by a collective of people asserting their own formulation of what it means to live in comfort and how that comfort can be produced.112 For Kropotkin, the way the right to live is asserted and decided is through “free associations”: groups and individuals who, in attempting to free themselves from government organization, voluntarily come together in their own organizations to pursue common objectives.113 For Kropotkin, this also involves the independence of territory as he argues: “The independence of each small territorial unit becomes a pressing need; mutual agreement replaces law in order to regulate individual interests in view of a common object – very often disregarding the frontiers of the present states.”114 Later, in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Kropotkin identifies the importance of communal territory as an instigating factor for freedom and ethical learning, as it brings together those who use the territory communally in everyday acts and responsibilities, and is fundamentally opposed to the establishing of private property.115 Errico Malatesta gets even closer than Kropotkin to power to be in describing almost the same reciprocal theory-practice that is present in power to be. Malatesta explains this relation as follows: “Between man and his social environment there is a reciprocal action. Men make society what it is and society makes men what they are, and the result is therefore a kind of vicious circle. To transform society men must be changed, and to transform men, society must be 111 Kropotkin, Peter Alekseevich, kni︠ a︡︡︡︡ zʹ. The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995: pp. 28-30 112 Kropotkin, Peter Alekseevich, kni︠ a︡︡︡︡ zʹ. The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings.: pp. 28-30 113 Kropotkin, Peter Alekseevich, kni︠ a︡︡︡︡ zʹ. The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995: pp. 36 114 Kropotkin, Peter Alekseevich, kni︠ a︡︡︡︡ zʹ. The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings.: pp. 36 115 Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. New York: Dover Publications, 2006.: pp. 100, 103-104, 123-124, 200 37 changed.”116 Like Kropotkin, Malatesta recognizes the need to form territorially free associations that reject the government.117 For Malatesta, these localities achieve freedom through establishing relations with other free associations that are interested in working together to create further social transformation.118 The Zapatistas’ autonomous territory and their voluntarily established governance councils can thus be understood to fit the definition of territorially free associations and as previously mentioned, the collective and reciprocal assertion of a (collective) right to decide society’s conditions of comfort and production fits with the communal and also reciprocal assertion of power to be exercised by the Zapatistas. Given these similarities then, how are these political philosophies different? First, as I argue throughout this thesis, the Zapatistas understand their political cause and position to come from their specific historical situation and traditions. So, while the Zapatistas can be described as anarchic or anarchistic in that they assert the right to live and free association, they had their own versions of the right to live and free association before Kropotkin or Malatesta wrote about them. Second, while Kropotkin argues for a territorial autonomy that is similar to the one that is essential to power to be, he finds a similarity with Locke in that he argues that the land “owes its value to the needs of an ever-increasing population” who need to cultivate it to unearth that value.119 Kropotkin insists on progress occurring through mutual aid as nature is conquered. In his theory, people act in mutual aid against nature as communities arise “step by step bringing the woods and the steppes under the dominion of man.”120 In this 116 Errico Malatesta. “An Anarchist Programme” In Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta. 2015 ed. Retrieved from: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-an-anarchist-programme: pp. 6 117 Errico Malatesta. “An Anarchist Programme”: pp. 12 118 Errico Malatesta. “An Anarchist Programme”: pp. 7,12 119 Kropotkin, Peter Alekseevich, kni︠ a︡︡︡︡ zʹ. The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995: pp. 16 120 Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. New York: Dover Publications, 2006.: pp. 107 38 conception, mutual aid stemming from the collective nature of humans averts a state of war between individuals but what remains is a sort of state of war against nature, waged on the principles of mutual aid between humans and with communal property. This argument poses an understanding of land that is dismissive of the reciprocal land relation of power to be, in which land works in collaboration with society to provide sustainable living conditions for people and the land. Malatesta’s argument in An Anarchist Programme is less clear on this issue, although by arguing that anarchists must take advantage of the environment to transform society,121 it appears that his position on the person-to-land relation is similar to Kropotkin’s. Thus, while the Zapatistas and Kropotkin’s Anarchism have similar philosophies, they diverge on how their histories inform their philosophies and even more substantially on how they understand and treat territory. Anarchism’s uptake in Mexico, however, can be understood to be slightly more influential to the Zapatistas. To show appreciation for one of the foremost proponents of ‘Tierra y Libertad’ (land and liberty), one of the largest autonomous municipalities on Zapatista territory took the name Ricardo Flores Magón, after the famous Mexican Anarchist of the revolutionary era.122 Magón’s influence within the Zapatistas is also notably mentioned by Marcos, who would at one point claim Magón as an important influence for the thinking of the Zapatistas on the topics of workers and liberty.123 Donald C. Hodges notes this influence when arguing that the EZLN are modern representatives of Mexican anarchism who have adopted a Magonist ideology.124 When looking at Magón’s writing, it is clear why Hodges makes this argument. 121 Errico Malatesta. “An Anarchist Programme” In Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta. 2015 ed. Retrieved from: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-an-anarchist-programme: pp. 7 122 Benjamin Maldonado. “Introduction” In Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magón Reader. 2015 ed, (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), https://go.exlibris.link/XGVRSJRW.: pp. 14 123 Donald C. Hodges, Mexican Anarchism after the Revolution, 1st ed., (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).: pp. 199-200 124 Donald C. Hodges, Mexican Anarchism after the Revolution: pp. 199 39 Magón argued repeatedly about the value of land held in common, stressed the injustice of the dispossession of land from Indigenous Mexicans, and proclaimed that private property originated in “crime, fraud, and the abuse of force… [and thus was initiated by a] despotic attempt to seize lands from indigenous tribes”.125 Despite the influences and resonances of Mexican Anarchism with the Zapatistas, Hodges’ 1995 claim that the Zapatistas are the representatives of Mexican Anarchism has a similar issue to the Anarchist position that the Zapatista member was responding to in the letter mentioned towards the beginning of this section: it incorrectly takes Anarchism to be the Zapatistas’ focal point and key influence. Hodges spends most of his analysis of the Zapatistas on how various radical groups descended on Chiapas to help form the EZLN.126 This creates an irresolvable tension that is only ‘resolved’ through the dismissal of the importance of Indigeneity to the Zapatistas, as the Indigenous population is treated in Hodges’ analysis as an object to be ‘politicized’ by the left-wing radicals who have moved to their territory. The importance of how the radicals learned from the Indigenous peoples of Chiapas is acknowledged yet ultimately dismissed for the purpose of emphasizing the importance of Anarchist influence. When this approach is taken to explain and analyze the Zapatistas, those who follow it will miss that the Indigenous peoples of Chiapas have their own critiques of state and capital independent of any Anarchist influence. For example, the relationship between state and capital in Chiapas is identified through the Tseltal word ajvalil, which translates to “master-governor” and refers to “an authority who can be a government official, an estate owner, or both”127 The Anarchist 125 Ricardo Flores Magón, Charles Bufe, and Mitchell Cowen Verter, Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magón Reader, (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), https://go.exlibris.link/XGVRSJRW.: pp. 141, 157, 167, 177-178, 275 126 Donald C. Hodges, Mexican Anarchism after the Revolution, 1st ed., Book, Whole (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).: pp. 192-200 127 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017.: pp. 16 40 tendency to ignore the Indigeneity of the Zapatistas thus appears to be a central reason for tensions between Anarchism and the Zapatistas, despite the existing similarities and influences. The same argument applies to understanding Magón as the primary influence of the Zapatistas. In his theorizing and propagandizing on land, Magón offers a similar sort of argument for human domination over nature as Kropotkin (with a tinge of Locke), as he argues that the earth must be taken and cultivated freely as a matter of “natural justice, in the name of the right of every human being to live and develop his body and mind.”128 This may be the sort of orthodox thinking of Magón that, in an interview with an Anarchist magazine, caused Marcos to group Magonismo with the “orthodox line, close-minded and stupid.”129 When this ‘orthodox line’ is properly understood as an important but not subsuming influence, and the centrality of Indigeneity is noted, there can be a displacement of the ‘domination over nature’ aspects of Anarchist theory and practice. As Escobar argues: “Well beyond a ‘turn to the Left,’ these ‘worlds and knowledges otherwise’ have the potential to de-naturalize the hegemonic distinction between nature and culture on which the liberal order is founded”130 So how then, may the tensions between Anarchism and the Zapatistas be resolved in order to move towards solidarity? It is clear that non-Indigenous anarchists must move beyond the confines of their theory and practice insofar as that theory and practice subsumes social 128 Ricardo Flores Magón, Charles Bufe, and Mitchell Cowen Verter, Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magón Reader, (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), https://go.exlibris.link/XGVRSJRW.: pp. 155-156, 167 129 Aguilera, Eugenio, Hernández, Ana Laura, Rodríguez, Gustavo, and Devereaux, Pablo Salazar. “Interview with Subcommander Marcos” In Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 294-316. Autonomedia, 1994.: pp. 300 130 Arturo Escobar, “Latin America at a Crossroads,” Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 1–65, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380903424208.: pp. 39. I should note that by using this quotation I am not implying that Anarchism fits entirely within what Escobar understand as the ‘liberal order’. However, I am implying that the orthodox line of Anarchism has not broken with the hegemonic distinction between nature and culture that exists within the liberal order. If movements like the Zapatistas are to be subsumed into this orthodox line of Anarchism there is the potential for their break of this hegemonic distinction to be hidden or erased. 41 movements under their Anarchist banner. Like I argue in the previous paragraph, a proper, non-subsuming contextualization of the influence of the ‘orthodox line’ of Anarchism within the Zapatistas prevents the dismissal of many of the movements’ key aspects. Given their similarities, if this tendency to conflate the Zapatistas with anarchists is abandoned, a clearer pathway to solidarity seems likely to emerge. The path towards solidarity and away from this subsuming tendency can be found in Richard J.F. Day’s work on what he calls an anarchistic logic of affinity—a mode of social movement operation that defies the hegemony of state-oriented approaches to social change—that entails the “proliferation of a large number of small and relatively disparate struggles” that are never totalized “through the mediation of an overarching identity” as that would risk the creation or re-installing of a sort of hegemony.131 In this anarchistic logic of affinity, struggles or movements are connected (they can find solidarity) in their pursuit of anarchistic (anti-state and anti-capitalist) goals, but that connection (and solidarity, or what Day calls “new forms of community”132) is dependent on their unique production of “alternatives to state and corporate forms of social organization”.133 Thus, a move towards solidarity can be made if anarchists or other like-minded social movements or struggles follow an anarchistic logic of affinity rather than the aforementioned tendency to subsume unique movements or struggles under a single label. An example of social movement theorizing that encourages this anarchistic logic of affinity is Glen Coulthard’s work on self-affirmative praxis, as self-affirmative praxis enables the creation of different modalities of being through a struggle against the oppressive force of the 131 Richard J. F. Day, “From Hegemony to Affinity,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 5 (September 1, 2004): 716–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950238042000260360.: pp. 739, 740, 732. Day is drawing on the work of Gustav Landauer when he makes this part of his argument. 132 Richard J. F. Day, “From Hegemony to Affinity,”.: pp. 740 133 Richard J. F. Day, “From Hegemony to Affinity,”.: pp. 740 42 state and capitalism. The idea of self-affirmative praxis emerges from Coulthard’s response to the sort of counterargument that may be posed to the theory-practice relation of power to be that argues: since social movement practices that respond to dispossession are formed by the dispossession, they are fundamentally reactionary rather than generative. Coulthard argues that “what implicitly gets interpreted by the state as Indigenous peoples’ ressentiment—understood as an incapacitating inability or unwillingness to get over the past—is actually an entirely appropriate manifestation of our resentment: a politicized expression of Indigenous anger and outrage directed at a structural and symbolic violence that still structures our lives, our relations with others, and our relationships with land.”134 This resentment is not reactionary for Coulthard. Instead, it represents an important moment of consciousness in externalizing the internalization of the inferiority complex originally conceptualized by Fanon.135 Furthermore, this resentment “can help prompt the very forms of self-affirmative praxis that generate rehabilitated Indigenous subjectivities and decolonized forms of life in ways that the combined politics of recognition and reconciliation has so far proven itself incapable of doing.”136 According to Coulthard’s argument then, social movement practices that seek to respond to injustices are not inherently and wholly reactionary, as through reaction and anger, they have the potential to create self-affirmative praxis. Power to be can be understood to exist through this exact process. In responding to the privatizing initiatives of the Mexican state and capital, the Zapatistas enacted their power to be as something definitionally self-affirming and rehabilitating of decolonized forms of life. This idea of self-affirmative praxis finds striking similarity with power to be and the political actions of the Zapatistas, yet, since it has the built-in notion that the self-affirmation occurring is not referring to a singular self or modality of being, it does not push for any kind of 134 Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014: pp. 109 135 Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: pp. 114 136 Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: pp. 109 43 universalization. In fact, the similarities are so striking that Coulthard’s argument on the rejection of colonialism through Indigenous resistance becoming self-affirmative almost mirrors Esteva’s words on the same subject (but in reference to the Zapatistas). Coulthard argues that through actions of resistance “we physically say ‘no’ to the degradation of our communities and to exploitation of the lands on which we depend. But they also have ingrained within them a resounding ‘yes’: they are the affirmative enactment of another modality of being, a different way of relating to and with the world…they become a way of life, another form of community. They embody through praxis our ancestral obligations to protect the lands that are core to who we are as Indigenous peoples.”137 This is power to be. The resounding ‘yes’ of asserting a way of life and community through practices of resistance is the reciprocal relationship between practice and theory I have expounded in this thesis. Almost identically to Coulthard, in describing the Zapatista rejection of the Mexican state and capital, Esteva argues “[t]o say no might be the most complete and vigorous way of affirmation. The unifying ‘no’, expressing a shared opposition, usually conveys multiple yes’es: the affirmations of what all those sharing a rejection are and want. The organization around what people don’t want, avoiding the condensation of their diverse affirmations, recognizes such plurality. It thus potentiates the political force of the rejection, protecting the capacities and initiatives of those affirming themselves in their own spaces, mutually supported by the ‘no’. ”138 While Coulthard’s mention of land is more evident than Esteva’s, Esteva also mentions those resisting as having their own spaces, and as has been established in the previous section, what it means for the Zapatistas to have their own spaces is fundamentally connected to a reciprocal and communal relationship with land. Thus, despite discussing different resistances, Coulthard’s theory on resentment and self-affirming praxis and the Zapatista’s power to be find a great 137 Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014: pp. 169 138 Gustavo Esteva, “The Zapatistas and People’s Power,” Capital & Class 23, no. 2 (1999): 153–182: pp. 161 44 similarity in connecting land, freedom, and practice, all without pulling one set of ideas and practices under the label of the other. Taiaiake Alfred’s conceptualization of Anarcho-Indigenism may also be adopted within an anarchistic logic of affinity as a concept that has the goal of creating non-statist alternatives to the current (statist) political order and to displace the aspects of Anarchism that dismiss Indigeneity.139 Taiaiake Alfred conceptualizes Anarcho-Indigenism as a political philosophy that condenses “cultural and spiritual rootedness in this land and the Onkwehonwe [original people] struggle for justice and freedom and the political philosophy and movement that is fundamentally anti-institutional, radically democratic, and committed to taking action to force change: anarchism [emphasis in original].”140 Indeed, Alfred’s concept of Anarcho-Indigenism embodies an anarchistic logic of affinity in that it lays out its “commitment to the construction of non-statist socialist alternatives” that is connected to Indigeneity in a way that resists homogenization from Anarcho-Indigenism to Anarchism. Finally, there are examples of this movement towards solidarity playing out in the Zapatista movement itself. As noted previously, the Zapatistas engage with a number of activists who participate in mutual aid efforts such as health clinics or bike repairs shops.141 Abigail Andrews points out that the Zapatistas engage in a unique sort of South-to-North solidarity that establishes “alliances across power differences [emphasis in original] by critiquing existing 139 Paul Nadasny notes that Anarcho-Indigenisms must “always be spoken about in the plural (and some ‘indigenisms’ will not be anarchical at all)” (Nadasny 2017, 309). I believe it is important to note this to be clear about the plurality of Anarcho-Indigenism(s), but I do not think that Alfred’s concept, despite being stated in the singular, eliminates the possibility for a plurality of Anarcho-Indigenisms. 140 Gerald R. Alfred, Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom, (Peterborough, Ont; Broadview Press, 2005).: pp. 45 141 John Ross, “Celebrating the Caracoles: Step by Step, the Zapatistas Advance on the Horizon,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 29, no. 1 (2005): 39–46.: pp. 45 45 power dynamics.”142 The Zapatistas thus move towards solidarity in a way that protects them from being subsumed under a particular label while also facilitating a kind of solidarity that is critical of that subsumption. An answer then, to the question of resolving tensions between Anarchism and the Zapatistas, is to move towards solidarity from the anarchistic logic of affinity rather than an orthodox and totalizing notion of Anarchism. 142 Abigail Andrews, “How Activists ‘Take Zapatismo Home’: South-to-North Dynamics in Transnational Social Movements,” Latin American Perspectives 38, no. 1 (2011): 138–52, https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X10384217.: pp. 148 46 5: Conclusion The 1994 Zapatista rebellion in Eastern Chiapas began the process of initiating the territorial autonomy of Zapatista communities that would become an essential component of the Zapatista political philosophy of power to be. This rebellion, the territorial autonomy created by it, and the political philosophy of power to be that both constructed and was constructed by the rebellion and territorial autonomy, were enacted in response to a long history of private property being imposed in Chiapas by the Mexican state and capital. From the Díaz dictatorship’s emphasis on expulsion and privatization, to the trouble implementing Article 27, to the amendment of Article 27 to prepare Mexico for neoliberalization, the history of Eastern Chiapas had a history of the state and capital working together to institute a Lockean, private property-based system of governance. This emphasis on private property exercised on sovereign state territory was countered by the Zapatistas with their political philosophy of power to be, which advocates for the collective assertion of a communal and reciprocal relationship with the land and the society living on it. Refusal of government services and the creation of new self-government practices established territorial autonomy in Zapatista communities, which then, through its reciprocal process, allowed power to be to be asserted more freely. This territorial autonomy, while controlling many hectares of land, did not involve a separatist or sovereigntist aim. This autonomy fractured the sovereignty of the Mexican state by disrupting its total territorial control and enclosure. Instead of establishing or asserting a sovereign command-obedience, through power to be, Zapatista territorial autonomy became the base for a form of power that was continually being built through leadership that was subordinated to the collective, what the Zapatistas call “mandar obedeciendo” (governing while obeying).143 143 Mora Bayo, Mariana. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017. pp: 17 47 Given the anti-state and anti-capitalist nature of the Zapatista movement, comparisons of the movement to Anarchism are almost unavoidable. Indeed, the Zapatistas and power to be have many similarities with both the European and Mexican strains of Anarchism with their shared emphasis on the need for direct action, free associations rather than state power, and communal land. These similarities, however, have led to a comparison between the movements that has involved anarchists dismissing the Zapatistas or attempting to subsume them under their label. While the Zapatista political philosophy and power to be are in a sense anarchic or anarchistic, they are not reducible or subsumable to Anarchism144 (and those in the movement would not like them to be) because they are derived in large part from the mixed theory and practice of the Indigenous people of Chiapas, and because they have a reciprocal relationship with the land. A resolution of the tensions between Anarchism and the Zapatistas is realizable and solidarity becomes more feasible when Day’s anarchistic logic of affinity is adopted. The anarchistic logic of affinity advocates for the formation of the revolutionary subject through the creation and action of political movements and struggles that “could be linked by a commitment to the construction of non-statist socialist alternatives, but never totalized – or even pluralized or quasi-universalized – through the mediation of an overarching identity.”145 Coulthard’s work on self-affirmative praxis and Alfred’s work on Anarcho-Indigenism can be seen as examples of theory that align with an anarchistic logic of affinity. Coulthard’s argument and discussion of self-affirming praxis that emerges through resistance and fosters the growth of other modalities of being embraces resistance in such a way that is not limited to one specific resistance (as is seen 144 There are many different conceptualizations of Anarchism. Here I am referring to Anarchism as it is portrayed by those anarchists attempting to dismiss the Zapatistas or subsume them under their label without recognizing the unique qualities of the anti-state and anti-capitalist alternative they have constructed. 145 Richard J. F. Day, “From Hegemony to Affinity,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 5 (September 1, 2004): 716–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950238042000260360.: pp. 739 48 through the comparison with Esteva). Alfred’s conceptualization of Anarcho-Indigenism embraces elements of Anarchism while making sure they are tied to Indigeneity in such a way that prevents any kind of subsumption, thus embodying the sort of commitment to non-totalized non-state alternatives discussed by Day in the anarchistic logic of affinity. 49 Bibliography Abigail Andrews, “How Activists ‘Take Zapatismo Home’: South-to-North Dynamics in Transnational Social Movements,” Latin American Perspectives 38, no. 1 (2011): 138–52, https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X10384217. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Political Science
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Coulthard, Glen Sean, 1974-
When the theoretical confronted the practical : Zapatista territorial autonomy as opposition to the cooperation of state and capitalism
Text