Fetishizing
the Zapatistas: a critique of "Change the World Without Taking Power"
posted
to www.marxmail.org
on June 7, 2003
As should be clear to even the most casual observer
on the left, the Chiapas rebellion has become as much of a paradigm for the
post-Marxist left as October 1917 was for an earlier generation of Marxists.
The collapse of the USSR, the difficulties faced by socialist Cuba and an
ostensibly brand-new way of doing politics in Chiapas put wind in the sails of
ideological currents that never were committed to classical Marxism to begin
with, including the autonomist and anarchist movements. In contrast to the
anarchists, autonomism has positioned itself as retaining the emancipatory core
of Marxism, while disposing of the dross. This is one of the central messages
of John Holloway's "To Change the World Without Taking Power". We
will assess this claim in due time, but first some background on the Zapatista
left in general and how it took shape.
Although the Chiapas revolt grew out of Mayan
resentment over unemployment, land hunger, racism and other injustices that
face indigenous peoples everywhere in the world, it transformed itself very
rapidly into a global movement that at time appeared as spokes radiating from
Subcommandante Marcos's laptop, just as an earlier generation rotated around
the Kremlin.
The Zapatistas became hosts of a series of
'encuentros' (encounters) in Mexico and elsewhere, the first of which was held
in Chiapas in August 1996, two and a half years after the start of their
revolt. Some 3,000 guests from 43 different countries came together as part of
an International Encounter Against Neoliberalism and for Humanity to discuss
how to "change the world".
With the armed revolt at an end, the EZLN had
begun to explore nonviolent options. According to the August 5, 1996 Guardian,
some high profile guests including Danielle Mitterrand (the wife of the French
social democratic leader), Eduardo Galeano and Douglas Bravo were encouraged by
this transition. Bravo was himself a former guerrilla fighter in Venezuela
during the 1960s but became committed to a kind of "civil society"
reformism that eventually led him to join the opposition to Hugo Chavez.
When asked what he expected from the gathering,
Subcommandante Marcos said: "I haven't a damn clue." This led French
intellectual Regis Debray to comment. "This is a return to the essential
resistance." Debray, like Bravo, was once part of the foquismo left in
Latin America but in more recent years has become part of the French cultural
establishment, serving for a time as adviser to President Mitterand whose wife
shared Debray's enthusiasms for heterodox leftisms.
These encuentros had a tremendously energizing
effect on the post-Marxist left in the same way that Comintern conferences in
the early 1920s had on people like John Reed. Unlike the Comintern, these
gatherings adopted the discourse of the anti-globalization movement. Instead of
hearing Bukharin presenting an analysis of the latest stage of imperialism, the
delegations focused on 'neoliberalism', privatization and other symptoms of the
underlying capitalist crisis. The search for solutions in Chiapas stopped short
of obviously passé measures such as socialist revolution.
Even though the imagination-challenged Marxist
movement tended to shy away from these gatherings, as early as the second--held
in Spain in 1996--some stodgy participants were beginning to get impatient and
think in terms of goals, even though this was the last thing on
Subcommandante's mind. As Gustavo Esteva writes in the collection "Auroras
of the Zapatistas" (Midnight Notes, 2001), a tension arose between those
"who fully enjoyed the opportunity to meet and share with others" and
those who sought "a manifesto, an organization, a political
platform…"
By 1998, the encuentros began to shift
perceptibly toward becoming the anti-globalization movement of today (well,
perhaps not post 9/11, but of a couple of years ago at least). Yale Professor
David Graeber, who has become a highly visible opponent of Marxism and defender
of this new way of doing politics (or rather not doing politics), claims that
this movement was born in Barcelona that year:
"The real origins of the movement, for
example, lie in an international network called People's Global Action (PGA).
PGA emerged from a 1998 Zapatista encuentro in Barcelona, and its founding
members include not only anarchist groups in Spain, Britain and Germany, but a
Gandhian socialist peasant league in India, the Argentinian teachers' union,
indigenous groups such as the Maori of New Zealand and Kuna of Ecuador, the
Brazilian landless peasants movement and a network made up of communities
founded by escaped slaves in South and Central America."
http://flag.blackened.net/pipermail/infoshop-news/2001-November/000276.html
One year later the Seattle protests erupted and
the world's attention became riveted on this new movement that apparently had
its origins in Chiapas, Mexico. While some of the popularizers of this new
movement put their message across in the mass media, a significant number were
based in academia. At the University of Texas, Harry Cleaver synthesized
autonomist Marxism and fashionable ideas about the power of the Internet in
order to advance the idea that Subcommandante Marcos's laptop represented
something entirely new. He writes:
"The rhizomatic pattern of collaboration
has emerged as a partial solution to the failure of old organizational forms;
it has --by definition-- no single formula to guide the kinds of elaboration
required. The power of The Net in the Zapatista struggle has lain in connection
and circulation, in the way widely dispersed nodes of antagonism set themselves
in motion in response to the uprising in Chiapas."
While it would be foolish to underestimate the
power of the Internet, one might plausibly raise the question of whether
technical-organizational dichotomies between hierarchies and networks get to
the heart of the challenges facing the left. As we move into a period of
deepening social and economic crisis punctuated by brutal imperialist
adventures, the Internet will eventually become part of the political landscape
just as the mimeograph was in years past. But technology can be no substitute
for a careful assessment of the relationship of class forces on the ground and
intelligent strategies and tactics based on that analysis.
A balance sheet on the progress made by the EZLN
in overcoming historic injustices to the Mayan people must be made on the basis
of tangible gains. It is doubtful whether the Internet can ever serve as a
panacea for problems that nag away at the Mexican left, Chiapas included. While
the telephone and mimeograph machine undoubtedly did a lot to empower the trade
union and social movements in the USA, it was ultimately strategy and tactics
that determined the outcome.
Turning now to John Holloway's "To Change
the World Without Taking Power", we enter a terrain where such mundane
matters seem to matter little. Taking Subcommandante Marcos's refusal to
specify goals or the methods necessary to achieve them as a starting point,
Holloway has written a book that effectively inflates the Zapatista style of
politics into a post-Marxist Communist Manifesto.
For narrow-minded technicians like myself who
like to keep databases of such things, this is now the third new communist
manifesto to occupy a place on my bookshelf alongside Hardt-Negri's
"Empire" (Zizek, "Nothing less than a rewriting of the Communist
Manifesto for our time") and Guattari-Negri's "Communists Like
Us" which purports modestly to "rescue 'communism' from its own
disrepute."
At first blush, all of these books seem driven
by the need to proceed directly to something called communism without passing
go. All the sordid business associated with what Bukharin called "the
transition period" will somehow be leapfrogged by a monumental act of
will, especially the bugbear of the autonomist movement: the state.
In chapter two (Beyond the State), Holloway
argues that it doesn't do any good for working people to create their own
state: "If the state paradigm was the vehicle of hope for much of the
century, it became more and more the assassin of hope as the century
progressed." Correctly observing that China and Russia failed to
"promote the reign of freedom", Holloway manages to avoid any
reference to Cuba. Since Cuba defies any easy pigeonholing as a totalitarian
dungeon, it tends to be swept under the rug in autonomist literature.
Holloway explains that Marxist assumptions about
transforming society fail to take into account that "capitalist social
relations, by their nature, have always gone beyond territorial
limitations". So, it becomes an exercise in futility to smash the
capitalist state and replace it with a workers state of the kind conceived by
Lenin in "State and Revolution" for to do so would simply
re-introduce oppressive power relations, especially those refracted through a
nominally socialist society's ties to the outside capitalist world. Or, as the
Who once put it in "Won't Get Fooled Again":
We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgement of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song
Holloway expresses the same sentiments in a more
polished manner: "You cannot build a society of non-power relations by
conquering power. Once the logic of power is adopted, the struggle against
power is already lost."
Far be it for me to even suggest that something
as passé as Marxist dialectics can still have some value, it would appear to me
that speaking in terms of power versus non-power cedes too much to formal
logic. While it is true that a woman cannot be pregnant and not pregnant at the
same time, certain social phenomena have contradictory aspects. For example,
when Father Gapon organized a demonstration to present a petition to the Czar,
some 200,000 St Petersburg workers marched behind him with pictures of the
Tsar, religious icons and church banners. Instead of dismissing this as a
genuflection before Czarism, Trotsky saw the other side of the process:
"Gapon did not create the revolutionary energy of the workers of St Petersburg,
he merely released it and events completely overtook him."
Oddly enough, despite a tendency toward cryptic
formulations, Subcommandante Marcos himself can be quite specific on the value
of power:
"When we governed, we lowered to zero the
rate of alcoholism, and the women here became very fierce and they said that
drink only served to make the men beat their women and children, and to act
barbarically, and therefore they gave the order that no drink was allowed, and
that we could not allow drinking to go on, and the people who received the most
benefit were the children and women, and the ones most damaged were the
businessmen and the government...
"The destruction of trees also was
prohibited, and laws were made to protect the forests, and the hunting of wild
animals was prohibited, even if they were from the government, and the
cultivation, consumption and trafficking in drugs were prohibited, and these
laws were upheld. The infant death rate went way down, and became very small,
just like the children are. And the Zapatista laws were applied uniformly,
without regard for social position or income level. And we made all of the
major decisions, or the 'strategic' ones, of our struggle, by means of a method
that they call the 'referendum' and the 'plebiscite'. And we got rid of
prostitution and unemployment disappeared as well as begging. The children had
sweets and toys. And we made many errors and had many failures. And we also
accomplished what no other government in the world, regardless of its political
affiliation, is capable of doing honestly, and that is to recognize its errors
and to take steps to remedy them."
Full:
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/ezln/marcos_one_year.html
In a certain sense, attempts to seize power and transform
all of society along the lines described by the Subcommandante are doomed to
failure unless humanity overcomes something called "fetishization"
which functions in Holloway's schema as a kind of tragic flaw, like Oedipus's
pride or Dr. Frankenstein's mad desire to create life from the parts of dead
bodies.
As most people are probably aware, fetish is a
term that has its origins in anthropology. It is a charm or amulet that has
magical powers for so-called primitive peoples. It is etymologically related to
the word factitious, which means artificial. Freud and other experts on
abnormal psychology have used the word to describe sexual attachments to
objects like shoes and other garments. For example, according to the tell-all
memoir of his mistress, President Salinas of Mexico had an Imelda Marcos-like
fetish for charro suits, the silver-buckled outfits and matching sombrero,
boots and spurs worn by mariachi singers. She reported that over 70 were hidden
away in his closet.
Holloway uses the term in its Marxist sense,
which he describes as a "central category" in Capital even though
"it is almost completely ignored by those who regard themselves as Marxist
economists". As understood by Marx and by Holloway as well, it is tied up
with alienation, especially that between the worker and the commodity he or she
produces. He sees fetishization as the main target for those who would change
the world: "Any thought or practice which aims at the emancipation of
humanity from the dehumanization of capitalism is necessarily directed against
fetishism." But Holloway takes Marx one step further. It is not simply the
separation between worker and commodity; it is also by extension the separation
between doing and done, and between subject and object. Thus, what begins as an
attempt grounded in political economy to elucidate how capitalism appears to
the ruled as a permanent system shades off into a kind of philosophical
critique of Cartesian dualism:
"Constitution and existence are sundered.
The constituted denies the constituting, the done the doing, the object the
subject. The object constituted acquires a durable identity. It becomes an
apparently autonomous structure. This sundering (both real and apparent) is
crucial to the stability of capitalism. The statement that 'that's the way
things are' presupposes that separation. The separation of constitution and
existence is the closure of radical alternatives."
Leaving aside the question of how to translate
this sort of thing into a punchy leaflet that will grab the attention of the
average worker, it does not really convey what Marx was all about in
philosophical terms. As a materialist, Marx saw human beings as part of the
physical universe: "The first premise of all human history is, of course,
the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be
established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their
consequent relation to the rest of nature." (German Ideology)
Within this context, ideas arise from social
relationships: "The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness,
is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material
intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental
intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material
behaviour." (German Ideology)
While expressed in somewhat different terms than
Holloway's heterodox views on "fetishization", the notion ideas
arising from material conditions conveys much more accurately Marx's understanding
of the relationship between humanity, ideology and class society. Historical
and material conditions govern the way we think. In order to become free human
beings unconstrained by bourgeois ideology, it is necessary to abolish
commodity production, which is the substratum of bourgeois society. Struggles
against "fetishism" are rather futile as long as commodity production
is generalized throughout society.
For Marx, the only way to overcome alienation
(and fetishism, by implication) is to change material conditions:
"This 'alienation' (to use a term which
will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished
given two practical premises. For it to become an 'intolerable' power, i.e. a
power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered
the great mass of humanity 'propertyless', and produced, at the same time, the
contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which
conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of
its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces
(which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their
world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical
premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution
the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily
be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development
of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established,
which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the
'propertyless' mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the
revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal
individuals in place of local ones." (German Ideology; emphasis added)
This is the reason that Marxists have
historically targeted the state. In order to achieve a classless society, it is
necessary to develop the productive forces to such a high degree that
competition for goods becomes more and more unnecessary. As leisure time and
the general level of culture increases, human beings will enjoy a level of
freedom that has never been attainable in class society.
For a variety of reasons, socialist revolutions
have occurred in backward countries where the development of productive forces
has been hampered by a number of factors, including imperialist blockade,
technological and industrial underdevelopment, low productivity of labor and
the need to stave off invasions and subversion--in other words, the kinds of
conditions that make a country like Cuba fall short of communist ideals.
Notwithstanding Cuba's difficulties, the revolution has made a significant
impact on peoples' lives, so much so that it earned the praise of James
Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, in May of 2001: "Cuba has
done a great job on education and health and if you judge the country by
education and health they've done a terrific job."
Wolfensohn was simply recognizing the reality of
statistics in the bank's World Development Indicators report that showed Cubans
living longer than other Latin Americans, including residents of the US
Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Literacy levels were on a par with Uruguay, while
the life expectancy rate was 76 years, second only to Costa Rica at 77. Infant
mortality in Cuba was seven deaths per 1,000 live births, much lower than the
rest of Latin America.
While it is true that Cuba is enmeshed in a
myriad of ways within the world capitalist economy, it did withdrew from the
World Bank and its sister lending agency, the International Monetary Fund, in
1959. Despite the collapse of the USSR and continuing efforts to destroy the
country economically by the USA, Cuba continues to develop its productive
capabilities and raise the cultural level of the people.
Turning to Chiapas, the general picture is far
less encouraging. In a February 3, 2003 Newsday article titled "Infant
Deaths Plague Mexico", we learn that the Comitan hospital serves nearly
500,000 people in Chiapas. Burdened by inadequate staffing and supplies, babies
die at twice the national rate. Meanwhile, the February 21, 2001 Financial
Times reported on a study conducted by the Association for the Health of
Indigenous Children in Mexico in the village of Las Canadas, Chiapas. It found
that not one girl had adequate nutritional levels compared with 39.4 per cent
of boys. Female malnutrition has actually led to physical shrinking over the
last decade from an average height of 1.42 meters to 1.32 meters. At the same
time, more than half of women who speak an indigenous language are illiterate -
five times the national average.
While nobody can blame the EZLN for failing to
make a revolution in Mexico, we would be remiss if we did not point out the
obvious material differences between the two societies, especially in
the countryside where poverty has traditionally been extreme. With its abundant
natural resources, including oil and fertile farmland, it is not too difficult
to imagine how much of a difference a socialist Mexico would have made in the
lives of the poor.
For John Holloway, access to decent medical care
seems far less important than "visibility", a term that he sees as
practically defining Zapatismo and presumably missing altogether in dreary
Cuban state socialism. This is expressed through the balaclava, the mask that
Subcommandante wore at press conferences and which has since been appropriated
by Black Block activists breaking Starbucks windows in the name of
anti-capitalism: "The struggle for visibility is also central to the
current indigenous movement, expressed most forcefully in the Zapatista wearing
of the balaclava: we cover our face so that we can be seen, our struggle is the
struggle of those without face."
While every movement certainly needs an element
of mystique, it is doubtful that the Zapatista movement could sustain itself
over the long haul using such symbols. Nor is it likely that it could succeed
without linking up to a dynamic, rising mass movement in the rest of Mexico.
Localized peasant struggles have a long history in Mexico going back to the
19th century. If you strip away the balaclava and Subcommandante Marcos's
laptop, you will find all the elements that ultimately frustrated the efforts
of the original Zapata, namely the failure of a regional uprising to become
part of a general assault on state power and the social and economic
transformation of society.
To fetishize these sorts of incomplete and
partial rebellions as a new way of doing politics not only does a disservice to
the valiant efforts of the Mayan people, it also creates obstacles to those of
us who also want to change the world but on a more favorable basis. For in the
final analysis, it requires a democratic and centralized movement of the
working class and its allies to take power in a country like Mexico.
Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list:
http://www.marxmail.org