Despite all the discussion of the Zapatistas in the mass media and the Internet, there are actually very few scholarly works written in English. Journalist John Ross wrote a book 4 years ago that is now out of print. Dan La Botz, author of the excellent book on the Teamsters for Democratic Union called "Rank and File Rebellion," has written a study of the overall political and economic crisis in Mexico. I suspect is quite good, given his track record.

However, I can't imagine a more useful or informative book than George Collier's "Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas," published by Francis Moore Lappe's outstanding Food First Foundation. Collier, an anthropologist, has spent 30 years researching peasant life in Chiapas. His father was John Collier, Sr., who was Commissioner of Indian Affairs under Franklin Roosevelt and an activist for indigenist causes. My remarks on Chiapas draw extensively from his excellent book that I recommend to everybody for more complete information. (Food First is at www.foodfirst.org.)

It is important to realize that the peasant rebellion broke out in Chiapas for reasons almost identical to those behind the rebellions in Peru and Guatemala I previously reported on: land hunger. While the Mexican Revolution delivered the most substantial land reform in Latin American history, it never broke from the capitalist system. So the contradictions of the capitalist system have attacked the land claims of the indigenous peoples and the peasants, no matter how sweeping the various land reform acts. In Peru and Guatemala, semi- feudalism confronted the largely Indian peasantry. In Mexico, it has instead been the undiluted machinations of capitalism itself.

In 1914, as a consequence of the original Zapata revolution, debt slavery became illegal in Mexico. Even though this semi-feudal institution disappeared, the naked forces of capitalism continued to kept the peasant oppressed. The most notable example was the ability of non-Indians to purchase communal lands owned by impoverished Indian communities in the highlands of southern Mexico. In their place, cattle ranches and coffee plantations soon appeared. Now that the landless peasant had to earn his wage, he had no choice except to work for the capitalist rancher or farmer. The formal debt slavery may have disappeared, but the Indian farmhand stayed tied to the "padron."

A new upsurge in the Mexican Revolution took place in the 1930s during the administration of President Lazaro Cardenas, father of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. Responding to the plight of the peasants who never received the full land benefit of land in 1914, he enacted a new agrarian reform. Cardenas, like FDR, had no committment to total social transformation. His reforms, like our own New Deal, served to stabilize the capitalist system itself. By co-opting the Mexican peasantry, as FDR was attempting to do vis-à-vis the American working-class, Cardenas hoped to reduce social inequality and boost confidence in the social system in one fell swoop.

His main concern was to help Mexico recuperate from the devastating effects of the 1929 crash. The Great Depression curtailed demand for Mexican exports, which resulted in the loss of foreign capital that the bourgeoisie required for industrial development. Cardenas put forward an alternate development model. He instituted a six-year plan that would replace export-oriented agriculture with new domestic industrialization based on peasant production of cheap food. In order to free up land for the production of foodstuffs for the internal market, the government began to expropriate land from stagnant commercial estates. The state turned land over to ejidos, which the largely Indian peasant communities controlled. Chiapas benefited substantially from this land reform and a base for the governing PRI party that extended well into the 1960s.

Even though the powerful PRI party had committed itself to land reform, there were serious obstacles to its implementation in Chiapas. The main problem is that it sometimes took years for the government agencies to adjudicate land claims. The endemic lack of democracy in Mexico means that corruption and favoritism often determines who gets land. The review process is also a frustrating bureaucratic experience. Collier states:

"According to one study, land claims involved some twenty-two different government groups and public agencies and a twenty-seven-step process requiring almost two years of bureaucratic effort, if the claim was unopposed. In Chiapas, according to the same study, it took an average of more than seven years for the federal government to approve claims that had already been provisionally accepted by state authorities. It is understandable that being to 'hurry up and wait' caused strain between peasants in eastern Chiapas, who have generated hundreds of claims in recent decades, and agrarian officials."

We can compare the process to securing an apartment in public housing in New York City, where you have to have influential friends in the bureaucracy. In the meantime, you have to either live on the streets or on the couches of friends. Picture that process in the context of a tenfold economic misery and you might understand what was causing the Chiapas peasantry to turn to armed struggle. Not only would you not have a place to live, neither would you have food to eat since you lacked land to grow your own and the cash to buy any in the stores.

Before they picked up the gun, they organized themselves into aboveground, legal protest groups. The most significant example was the Indigenous Congress that met in 1974 in order to codify Mayan demands. This Congress met at almost the same exact time as a similar gathering taking place in Nicaragua to promote Miskitu interests during the Somoza regime. In both Mexico and Nicaragua, the Church played a key role in bringing Indian activists together. In Mexico, stepped up activity soon followed as catechists met with indigenous leaders throughout Chiapas. Since Chiapas was home to many Protestant sects as well, the activists decided to create a nonsectarian movement. This led them to found Popular Politics in 1978, which gradually began to reduce the role of the church-based catechists.

In a by now depressing pattern, the Marxist movement in Mexico did not greet the mobilization of indigenous peoples with universal acclaim. Collier comments that "many intellectuals denied the political potential of the country's indigenous peoples and claimed that they were not worth organizing because they represented an anachronistic, regressive sector of society that impeded the development of the proletarian class consciousness needed to overthrow capitalism." In other words, they were dogmatic Marxists.

Other left-leaning intellectuals disagreed. Arturo Warman, author of We Come to Object: The Peasants of Morelos and the National State," argued that peasant production, spurred by Lazaro Cardenas's agrarian reform in the 1930s, had been indispensable to the development of Mexico's urban economy by providing cheap food and thus enabling industry to keep wages low." Alain de Janvry concluded that peasants were really semiproletarians because they also sold their labor in the cities on a seasonal or part-time basis. What was presumably lacking in their scholarship, however, was an engagement with the indigenous as opposed to class interests of the peasants. This economic reductionism was not as deadly as that of their ideological foes, but was still a hindrance to a deeper understanding and a poor guide to action.

What finally drove the Chiapas peasantry to the point of revolt was ironically the oil-boom of the 1970s. Capitalist (and vulgar Marxist) development models assume that as wage labor and capitalist agriculture displace subsistence agriculture, the result will be benign. Smiling factory workers will enjoy the bounties of consumer goods at their local grocery. Many peasants went to work in the oil and related construction industries in southern Mexico in this period, but the results were increasing misery. The way in which this took place is a telling case study of why capitalism is an irrational system.

After OPEC raised oil prices in 1972, the Mexican government decided to expand production for the export market. In a world glutted by petrodollars, it found it easy to finance the expansion of oil production and ambitious infrastructure projects. The government completed two major hydroelectric power projects in Chiapas. As the oil economy heated up, the southeastern portion of the country began to supply Mexico with half of its hydroelectric power and much of the oil for export.

During this same period, Mexican agriculture went into a steep decline as the country experienced what some development economists refer to as oil syndrome, or Dutch disease. This refers to how export booms, oil in particular, undermine other sectors of a country's economy. The Dutch experienced this phenomenon when North Sea gas development caused other branches of the economy to wither. There is nothing that finance capital loves better than a quick buck. In Mexico's case, while oil-centric industry expanded from 27 percent of the GDP in 1965 to 38 percent in 1982, the agricultural share fell by half.

A radical transformation of social relations in the countryside was taking place behind this rather dry set of statistics. Farmworkers left the countryside in huge numbers to take up employment in Mexico City or the United States. During the presidency of Luis Echeverria (1970-76), agriculture shifted from basic staples like corn to export crops such as fruit and beef. When 1980 arrived, Mexico was importing 25 percent of its corn.

Some of the Chiapas peasantry was fortunate enough to land jobs in the new oil and construction industries. The entry of these people into the wage economy spawned a new class of upwardly mobile businessmen in the region. When a construction worker invested his wages into a trucking, retail or construction company, it became possible to move up rapidly in the humble Chiapas economic hierarchy. That many of these new entrepreneurs were Indians themselves did not lessen the class oppression as the rich took advantage of the poor in the changing economy.

The biggest changes occurred in agriculture, however. Peasants who invested their wages in "improved" farming techniques transformed the landscape of Chiapas as they discovered the dubious benefits of pesticides and herbicides. This meant that fewer peasants could produce more commodities for the export market, but the old communal ties began to break down as class differences divided wealthy peasants from the "redundant" ones. This process was extreme in the region of Zinacanteco, as Collier describes:

"The chemically intensive, but not labor intensive, method of farming also undermined the social organization of many peasant hamlets by removing a certain safety net of mutual dependence that kept young and poor people who needed food bound to their older and wealthier neighbors who, when weeding and cultivating had been done by hand, needed people to help them. Prior to the 1980s, Zinacantan had been a place where the disadvantaged could count on others for their basic livelihoods as long as they were willing to help out with corn production. But as maize cultivation was displaced from its once central place in Zinacanteco life, the poor found themselves utterly marginalized; their labor in the fields was no longer required and they lacked any way of earning the money necessary to buy food."

The final blow came in 1992 when the Mexican government decided to end the agrarian reform conclusively. The oil boom had ended and Mexico went into a steep debt-based crisis. The PRI made a decision that agricultural exports could help lift Mexico out of the Depression. Thus it brought to an end to the land reform policies that had been a core principle of the ruling party for half a century. This had a devastating effect in Chiapas, where landless peasants now saw no way out of their misery. An intellectual who had moved to Chiapas to help organize the peasantry along militant class-struggle lines spoke for the peasants when he stated that only armed struggle could change things. His name was Marcos and he said:

"[The government] really screwed us, now that they destroyed Article 27 [the legal basis for land distribution], for which Zapata and his Revolution fought. Salinas de Gortari arrived on the scene with his lackeys, and his groups, and in a flash they destroyed it. We and our families have been sold down the river, or you could say that they stole our pants and sold them. What can we do? We did everything legal that we could do so far as elections and organizations were concerned, and to no avail."

Everbody knows that Harry Cleaver has been a tireless activist both on and off the Internet for the Zapatista cause. The example he has set is not only important for this particular struggle, but for others as well, including a labor movement that is more and more becoming internationalized. The sort of instantaneous electronic information that sprung up around the EZLN is now being deployed for the "wharfies" in Australia. If war comes to Colombia, there is no question that the Internet will serve as a brain and nervous system for a broad movement fighting US intervention in that country.

I do have differences with Harry that I want to take up in this section of my post. It has to do with the classic Marxist analysis of the role of the state, with which his articles disagree. Let us take a look at the concluding paragraph of his paper "The Zapatista Effect and the Cyberspacial Subversion of Foreign Policy:"

"While the capacity of such grassroots groups for collective protest action has been clearly demonstrated, their potential for taking over or usurping the functions of the nation-state and intergovernmental organizations will certainly turn on their capacity to elaborate and implement alternative modes of decision making and collective or complementary action to solve common or related problems. In some instances, such as the defense of human rights, ecological protection or the formulation of new constitutional frameworks for the protection of indigenous rights, this potential is already being realized. The strongest argument for the continued primary roles of the nation state and private corporations has been their ability to get things done. It seems highly likely that the amount of political will to displace them will depend on the emergence of what are viewed as practical and more attractive alternatives. So far, grassroots alternatives have demonstrated that imagination, creativity and insight can generate different approaches and new solutions to solving widespread problems. To the degree that such new solutions proliferate and are perceived as effective, the possibilities of replacing state functions with non-state collaboration will continue to expand. At the same time, because such an expansion threatens the established interests of states and those who benefit from their support, state efforts at repression or co-optation of such alternatives will continue. The degree to which the autonomy of grassroots efforts will be maintained will not be a question of imagination or organizational ability alone, but of their political power to resist such efforts and displace governmental hegemony. For this reason, the scope for the positive elaboration of grassroots initiatives at both local and global levels will depend entirely on their negative power to challenge existing policies and force concessions. In this drama we are barely into the opening act."

This statement fails to come to grips with the central problem for progressive politics. The armed revolution must smash the old state to pieces in order for a new state to come into existence that represents the true interests of workers and peasants. In Marxist jargon, we call this the dictatorship of the proletariat. Alas, there is no better term to take its place. The particular strand of Marxism that Harry identifies with tends to identify this paradigm with all the old abuses and failures of the Soviet model. Unfortunately, as long as the ruling class has the army and police at its disposal, it is very difficult to achieve significant structural change.

In the case of Chiapas, hungry peasants will not receive land until a government that represents their interests comes to power. Furthermore, it is impossible to elect such government. It has to ensue out of an armed struggle, such as the kind that toppled Somoza or Batista. While it is not unprincipled to urge a vote for Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, it would be foolish to think that his presidency would change anything in Mexico as long as the army and police remained intact. It would be nothing but a replay of the Allende regime in Chile.

The reason that the Zapatista struggle is attractive to post-Marxists such as Harry and Roger Burbach is that it tends to bracket out the whole nasty question posed in Lenin's "State and Revolution." Since the EZLN has little chance to lead a successful revolution as long as the rest of Mexico remains at a lower level of struggle, there is a tendency to identify with the movement as movement. It reminds me of the sort of infatuation with movement politics that characterized the German Social Democracy at the turn of the century when the actual problem of taking power receded into the background to a vanishing point.

While it is true that the Zapatistas have no immediate prospect of taking power, it is also true that their struggle is appropriate to the task at hand, which is extracting reforms from the Mexican government. The only way to achieve reforms is by struggling in a militant, if not revolutionary, fashion. The peasants of Chiapas attempted reforms through the system in the 1980s and have discovered that the only way the Mexican government will take them seriously is if they arm themselves and launch guerrilla warfare.

I want to conclude by suggesting a different perspective from which to view the Zapatista struggle and that is as part of the hemispheric wide struggle of indigenous peoples for economic and cultural survival. There should be little doubt that the underlying dynamics of the Zapatista struggle is like that of the Shining Path of Peru, or the Guatemalan Guerrilla Army of the Poor. It is a combined indigenous and agrarian struggle against capitalist oppression that centers on the fight for land.

Peru and Guatemala are in a simmering state right now and there is every possibility that the revolts might come to a full boil at some point in the future. Although Colombia does not have a large indigenous population as such, the meztiso population of the country could easily identify with such struggles to their West and North. The Colombian peasants may have not descended from mighty indigenous empires like the Inca or the Maya, but they still understand that their class interests are the same as the Peruvian and Guatemalans.

The Chiapas struggle is probably serving to inspire an upsurge in the North American Indian movement. In the various newspapers and Internet forums devoted to the Indian struggle, there is constant discussion of the importance of Chiapas. When I went to a powwow in the East Village a few months ago, there were leaflets everywhere announcing a protest at the Mexican consulate. The AIM leaders who visited Nicaragua to offer solidarity to the Miskitus will undoubtedly extend their support to the Chiapas Indians. This cause will be much less politically ambivalent than the one took place in Nicaragua.

The Latin American population in the United States continues to grow. The New York Times reported that there are 200,000 Mexicans living here, mostly from the state of Puebla. The same sort of economic contradictions that plague Chiapas drove them from Mexico. The Times reports that many do not even speak Spanish, but one or another Indian language, including Mextico. If the struggle in Mexico grows to the next level, there is every possibility that Latinos across the United States will join in powerful solidarity movement. New York City is also home to tens of thousands of Colombians. What if the United States decides to invade Colombia to help wipe out the guerrillas at the same time that it is trying to suppress revolts in Peru and southern Mexico? Latin American nationalism and internationalism might explode from as far south as Argentina to the northern cities such as Boston and Chicago.

In the meantime, the American Indian movement continues to assert itself. The Blackfeet peoples of the United States and Canada have decided that it is up to them to determine what the geographical and cultural boundaries of their nation should be. More power to them. As they and other North American Indian nations find ways to make their own alliances, they will certainly find an affinity with struggles to their south.

Such struggles will reverberate with those of other land-based peoples in Africa, from the Ogoni in Nigeria, to the aborigines in Australia. The issues are almost the same everywhere you go. They are the desire for economic development for the good of the people rather than the predatory corporations in their midst, respect for the ecology of the ancestral lands and the need to preserve cultural identity, including language and religions.