We are living in a time when the world is dis-enchanted. Now more than ever before, capitalism, in its neoliberal form, has reduced all social relations, all values, all qualifies to the status of commodities. This is a realm of universal quantification, commercialization, monetarization. This is an age when all human feelings are drowned in what Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, called “the icy water of egotistical calculation.”
Zapatism, a movement opposed to neoliberalism, seeks, on a modest scale, to re-enchant the world. (I am borrowing this idea from Yvon Le Bot’s 1997 book Le Peve zapatiste [The Zapatista Dream], but giving it a slightly different interpretation.) It is a movement freighted with magic, with myths, utopias, poetry, romanticism, enthusiasms, and wild hopes, with “mysticism” (in the sense that Charles Peguy used the word, in opposition to “politics”), (1) and with faith. It is also full of insolence, humor, irony, and self-irony. There is no contradiction in that: as Lukacs wrote in The Theory of the Novel, irony is the mysticism of times without a god....(2)
This ability to reinvent the re-enchantment of the world is no doubt one of the reasons why Zapatism is so fascinating to people far beyond the mountains of Chiapas.
What is Zapatism composed of? It is a subtle mixture, an alchemistic fusion, an explosive cocktail made up of several ingredients, several traditions, each of them indispensable, each of them present in the final product. Or rather, it is a carpet made of threads of different colors, old and new, interwoven in a wonderful design whose secret is known only to the Mayan Indians.
The first thread, the first tradition is Guevarism - Marxism in its Latin American revolutionary from. The original core of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) was Guevarist. Of course, the evolution of the movement has taken it far from its beginnings, but the uprising of January 1994 and the very spirit of the EZLN retain elements of this heritage: the importance of armed struggle, the organic link between the armed forces and the peasantry, the rifle as a material expression of an exploited people’s distrust of their oppressors, the readiness to risk one’s life for the emancipation of one’s brothers. We are a long way from the Bolivian adventure of 1967 but close to the revolutionary ethic of which Che was the incarnation.
The second thread, and doubtless the most direct, is of course the legacy of Emiliano Zapata. It is the uprising of the peasants and indigenous people, the Ejercito del Suras an army of the masses, the uncompromising struggle against the powerful that does not seek to seize power, the agrarian program for the redistribution of land, and the community organization of peasant life (what Adolfo Gilly called the “commune of Morelos”). But at the same time, it is Zapata the internationalist, who, in a famous letter of February 1918, hailed the Russian Revolution, emphasizing “the visible analogy, the obvious parallelism, the absolute parity” between it and the agrarian revolution in Mexico. “Both of them,” he wrote, “are directed against what Tolstoy called ’the great crime,’ against the infamous usurpation of the earth, which, belonging to all, like the water and the air, has been monopolized by a few powerful men, supported by the strength of armies and the iniquity of laws.”
“Land and Liberty” remains the central slogan of the new Zapatistas, who are continuing a revolution “interrupted” (as Gilly put it in the title of his beautiful book)(3) in 1919, by the assassination of Zapata in Chinameca.
A thread that the Zapatistas don’t talk much about is liberation theology. Yet it is hard to imagine that their movement could have had such an impact in Chiapas had it not been for the work accomplished by Msgr. Samuel Ruiz and his thousands of catechists ever since the 1970s - the work of raising consciousness in the indigenous communities and of encouraging them to organize to struggle for their rights. Of course, that work had no revolutionary tendency and rejected all violence, whereas the dynamics of the EZLN were to be entirely different. It is nonetheless true that in the indigenous communities the thinking of many Zapatistas - including some of the most prominent - was basically molded by liberation theology, by a religious faith that chose a commitment to the self-emancipation of the poor.
Perhaps the most important thread is the Mayan culture of the native people of Chiapas, with its magical relation to nature, its community solidarity, its resistance to neoliberal modernization. Zapatism harks back to a community tradition of the past, a pre-capitalist, pre-modern, pre-Columbian tradition. The Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui spoke, not without some exaggeration, of the “communism of the Incas.” In the same spirit, one can speak of the “communism of the Mayas.” Is that romanticism? Perhaps. But without the magic hammer of revolutionary romanticism, how are we to break the bars of what Max Weber called the steel cage in which capitalist modernity has confined us?
The EZLN is heir to five centuries of native resistance to the Conquest, to “civilization” and “modernity.” It is no coincidence that the Zapatista uprising was originally planned for 1992, the fifth centenary of the Conquest, and that at that time crowds of indigenous people occupied San Cristobal de las Casas and tore down the statue of the Conquistador Diego de Mazariegos, the hated symbol of their despoliation and enslavement.
The last, most recent thread, added to the others after January 1994, consists of the democratic demands made by Mexican civil society, by that vast network of unions, neighborhood associations, women’s, students’, and ecologists’ associations, of Leftist parties - Cardenists, Trotskyists, anarchists, and many other -ists - of associations of debtors, peasants, and indigenous communities that have risen up throughout Mexico to support the demands of the Zapatistas: democracy, dignity, justice.
There are many things one can criticize about the Zapatistas - for example, I don’t understand why they did not issue a call to vote for Cardenas in the last elections. But we must grant them one tremendous virtue: in these gloomy closing years of the century, in this time of triumphant neoliberalism, of rampant commercialism, of galloping cynicism, of a politics of politicians, they have succeeded in making people dream - in Chiapas, in Mexico, and in places all over the planet. They are re-enchanters of the world.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
1. That sense is perhaps best summed up in Peguy’s own definition of the two terms: “[L]a mystique républicaine, c’était quand on mourait pour la République, la politique républicaine, c’est à présent qu’on en vit.” (Republican mysticism meant dying for the Republic; republican politics at present means living off it. - JP) From the pamphlet Notre Jeunesse (1910) in Charles Peguy, Oeuvres en prose complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), Vol. III, p. 156.
2. “The writer’s irony is a negative mysticism to be found in times without a god.” From Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel (1920), translated from the German by Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971), p. 90.
3. An expanded version of Adolfo Gilly’s La Revolucion interrumpida (1971) has been translated from the Spanish by Patrick Camiller under the title The Mexican Revolution (London: N.L.B., 1983).