New Zapatista party
The EZLN rebels of Chiapas state have called for the formation of a new political party, regrouping large sections of the country's radical left. Sergio Rodriguez Lascano reports.
ON THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 31, 1995 AND during the morning of the first of January 1996, the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle was issued from the jungle and the highlands of Chiapas by the Zapatista National Liberation Army.
It is appropriate to remember the objectives of its previous declarations:
• The First declared war on the government and its army;
• The Second called for the creation of a National Democratic Convention, as a lever to promote the organisation of civil society";
• The Third proposed the creation of a National Liberation Movement, as a unifying bridge of all the opposition forces seeking to evict the PRI from the National Palace.
The Fourth contains the response of the EZLN to the National Consultation (Consulta Nacional) on the possibility of building "a political force of a new type based on the EZLN." In a way, these two years express the lived experience and the predicaments of the "journey from pain to hope," to use the words of Subcomandante Marcos.
Subterranean Mexico, the Mexico of those who are lower than the lowest, the descendants of the original inhabitants of these lands, after having formulated dozens of proposals, has come to the conclusion that the only hope of organising the Mexico of the bottom and, somehow, of the middle, lies in the launching of an awesome adventure: to build a rainbow, a rainbow • Party and nation Those projects which belong to the new opposition lack something which today has become decisive. We are opposed to a national project which implies its destruction, but we lack a proposal for a new Nation, a proposal for reconstruction. Part, but certainly not all its vanguard, has been and is the EZLN in its effort for a transition to democracy. In spite of the persecution and the threats, beyond the lies and deceits, the EZLN has remained legitimate and accountable and forges ahead in its struggle for democracy, liberty and justice for all Mexicans. Today, the struggle for democracy, liberty and justice in Mexico is a struggle for national liberation.* Extract from the EZLN Declaration which, besides being multicoloured, must also constitute a bridge linking the Mexico of the past with the Mexico of the future, and then, also, almost immediately, become a project of liberation and transmodernity, to paraphrase Enrique Dussel.
*Between 1492 and 1992, a long history unfolded, in the time of the
'Sixth Sun', in which the Latin
American people, the 'social bloc' of the oppressed, created their own culture.
They received the impact of a modernisation which is forced to ignore their history, because they are the invisible other face of modernity. Such a people can hardly realise a
Modernity in which they have always been the exploited, the oppressed part;
the 'other face' whose death has paid for th eprimitive accumulation of capital, for the development of the metropolitan countries (... / This is why the 'liberating project'|.../ is also an attempt to surpass Modernity. It is both a project of liberation and a project of 'transmodernity".
E. Dussel
1492, Covering the Other
The sector which has been most offended by the Zapatista proposal has been the so-called "political class", right and left.
The representatives of the latter in particular have had to unearth their "Marxist" texts and manuals, to debate against real or imaginary anarchist and utopian visions. There is a reason for this annoyed reaction. The Fourth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle, this message from the basement, poses problems which are not easy to face: all of a sudden Zapatismo seeks to organise social sectors in which, until now, it only had a moral presence. Thus words cease to be literature or, to be more precise, besides being literature they now also become building and organising tools. All of a sudden, to lead while obeying ceases to be a catchy phrase to be deployed in the internal debates of the political apparatuses, and becomes instead a subversive arrow which questions the very basis of the exercise and the theory of power. It places the political elites, government functionaries, as well as those, both right and left, who have made politics their profession, under a magnifying glass. It seeks to uncover the secret they have monopolised until now. It seeks to have a cook leading the State."
The exasperated response of the Mexican "political class" demonstrates the The author is a militant of Democracia Radical (formerly part of the Partido Revolucionario de las y los Trabajadores PRT). Democracia Radical is the Mexican section of the Fourth Intemational
International Viewpoint nº274 25
* Mexico validity of these words of one German intellectual:
"The substance of the secret of the state is infused into its bearers and it makes them immune, depending on their degree of initiation, against any questioning.
In this fashion they are exempted from responding. They thus become, in the true and precise sense of the word, irresponsible. Categories and privileges within a very precisely structured hierarchy are thus assigned in accordance with the state secrets one may have access to. Those of the lower subject mass are denied all secrets. That is to say, they have no right to share Power, to criticise it, to control it."
Hans Magnus Enzenberger Politics and Law Breaking
Some sectors linked to the traditional Mexican left, expected the Zapatista proposal to question the "party-state system" and not the political game as such. This left, in a sense is not only part of the game, but also a supporter of the game as such. We should not forget the brilliant and terrible words of Jesús Reyes Heroles, one of the theorists and practical agents of the actually existing antidemocracy: "to resist us is to support us." Extract from the EZLN Declaration • National liberation On January 1 of 1995, after breaking the military blockade with which the bad government pretended to submerge us in surrender and isolation, we called upon the different citizen forces to construct a broad opposition front which would unite those democratic voices which exist against the State-Party System: the National Liberation Movement. Although the beginning of this effort at unity encountered many problems, it lives still in the thoughts of those men and women who reject conformity when they see their Homeland under the rule of the Powerful and foreign moneys. This broad opposition front, after following a route filled with difficulty, regressions and misunderstandings, is about to concretize its first proposals and agreements for coordinated action. The long process of maturity of this organizing effort will bear fruit this new year. We Zapatistas, salute the birth of this Movement for National Liberation and we hope that, among those who form it there will always be a zeal for unity and respect 26 International Viewpoint February 1996
"And they were... thinking themselves, that is to say knowing themselves, that is to say learning themselves, that is to say standing in themselves, when the rain unfurled itself at the very centre of the afternoon, without falling or rising, just standing there and the men and the women of corn also stood watching the earliest gods and at that very moment a bridge of light, of clouds, of colours began to take shape and the bridge came from the mountain and it went to the valley, then it could clearly be seen that the bridge of lights and clouds and colours did not go anywhere and did not come from anywhere, it was just there, above the rain and the world."
Subcomandante Marcos Men Live Building Bridges of Seven Colours
The Fourth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle has now banged its fist on the table where the cards of power are dealt out. This is why some, after welcoming the willingness of the EZLN to transform itself into a political movement, immediately chide it for its unwillingness to play according to the rules of the political system and he rules which modernity has laid out for both the political struggle and the struggle for power. What is being criticised is precisely everything that is new in the proposal.
On the left, those who have attacked the Fourth Declaration are the very same people who never understood that the main goal of the struggle against capitalism was not a more equal distribution of income but the transformation of the core of that system. In other words, the transformation of the capital-wage labour relationship itself and, in particular, of everything in it that 1s linked to commodity fetishism. This is why they always thought that what existed in the USSR or Eastern Europe was socialism. They are incapable of understanding that, besides commodity fetishism, there also exists the fetishisation of power, or of the State. In the same manner that a relatively greater control of commodity production does not do away with exploitation, the taking of power by a group of professional politicians with good intentions does not do away with the political domination of an elite over society. This is why the Fourth Declaration is an arrow which reaches the very heart of politics as it has traditionally
The Declaration tries to alter the relation between those who rule and those they rule over. In other words, the relation between command and obedience which follows from all relations of political domination. Acceptance of the fact that some have to rule and the majority has to obey is the ultimate basis of capitalist domination, once it is stripped of its ostentatious Sunday clothes.
Representative democracy represents those ostentatious clothes. Periodically, the political elite consults the electorate about diverse options and programs. Of course those options and programs are rarely carried into practice, but once in office that is a minor matter. The fundamental aspect is that people delegate their decision-making power to a group of professional politicians (the guardians of the secrets of state) whose differences are located at the level of global projects, but never at the level of the relation between command and obedience itself. What are the differences between a paradigmatic character from the Partido de Acción Nacional, such as Fernández Cevallos, or one from the Partido de la Revolución Democrática, such as Muñoz Ledo, with Zedillo? They are all authoritarian, antidemocratic, personalistic (perhaps the first one less on this score), they are all disdainful. Without question they represent at least partially different social interests. But they feel at ease in a political system which seeks to maintain the difference between rulers and ruled. That is why each time they seek an agreement they are bothered not only by the presence and observation of the process by society, but even by the presence of their own companions. That is why their method is that of striking a deal, of reaching an agreement, in order to turn conflicts and contradictions into simple disagreements which can be easily patched over.
The method which comes from the jungle and the heights of Chiapas involves a rupture, not simply with the "party-state system" but with the political system as a whole. This is not connected, as some
"Chiapas is a deep ethical call, from the very depths of the history of all modernity. It addresses Latin America in its substance, but it also addresses
Europe, as it reminds it of the genocide carried out in the sixteenth century: the first holocaust of modernity, with fifteen million Indians dead, and fourteen million Africans sold as slaves
1...] Ethical situations which invite coresponsible solidarity with the oppressed, the poor, the excluded. We will have a lot to reflecton, to analyse, to conclude in the coming years, from the already quite intense first weeks of
1994"
E. Dusse The Ethical Sense of the Maya Rebellion of 1994
stubborn electoralists think, with an antielectoralist or abstentionist position. The crisis of the command-obedience relation is not conceived exclusively in the terrain of the relations between the regime and society. Instead, it involves all the aspects which have penetrated from above into the totality of social relations, whether in the electoral, social, cultural, psychological, educational or medical fields. It takes as point of departure the fact that the hierarchy in which a few command and the majority obeys exists in all the pores of society, becoming the foundation of the cultural domination of the oppressors, which is much more perverse in that it has achieved the consolidation of the relations among the poor themselves. The tableau which comes to life before the eyes of the worker, which Marx utilised to describe commodity fetishism, issimilar to the spectre which comes to life in all human beings when someone else decides for them, when someone else is more prepared or more capable of making the decisions which belong properly to the community.
While the EZLN understands power as a social relation and not simply as something that can be seized and transformed, it simultaneously raises the fact that all social relations contain the embryo of exclusion and domination. In this sense, the struggle is against the power of the state but also against the transmutation of that power into all human relations, even those which seem harmless but are sometimes as perverse or even more perverse than those directly established by the power of the state. And Extract from the EZLN Declaration • Intercontinental dialogue THREE NEW INITIATIVES WERE LAUNCHED by the Zapatistas as responses to the success of the Plebiscite for Peace and Democracy. An initiative for the international arena expresses itself in a call to carry out an intercontinental dialogue in opposition to neoliberalism. The two other initiatives are of a national character: the formation of civic committees of dialogue whose base is the discussion of the major national problems and which are the seeds of a non-partisan political force; and the construction of new places for encounters between civil society and Zapatismo. Three months after these three initiatives were launched, the call for the intercontinental dialogue for humanity and against neoliberalism is almost complete, more than two hundred civic committees of dialogue have been organized in all of the Mexican republic, and today, five new "Aguascalientes" will be inaugurated: one in the community of La Garrucha, another in Oventic, Morelia, La Realidad, and the first and last one in the hearts of all the honest men and women of the world. * this is done without much verbal gibberish, without so many fireworks.
This radical critique acquires even greater importance when applied to traditional concepts of modernity, because, in its "neo-liberal" phase, capitalism and its mediations are showing more clearly their harmful and perverse effects. What was
"strange," what was difficult to understand
(what created the crisis of our western and modern vision) was the fact that the alternative came from indigenous Mexico, whose rebellion raised the slogan of
Enough! It addressed everyone ethically, particularly the thinking and the practice of the left. That is the special importance of the call for an Intercontinental Meeting contained in the Declaration, under the slogan: For Humanity, Against Neoliberalism!
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The Fourth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle takes one more step towards making concrete one of the utopian principles (utopian in the best sense of the world) which have historically driven human beings, men and women, towards rebellion: the right to control one's own destiny, not to let someone else decide for
To command while obeying, those fortunate words which emerged in January of 1994, now enters a new phase, a gigantic challenge. Is it possible to maintain this prophetic vision and a tthe same time organise a new political force? I don't know, but the dilemma is worth the effort. At least so we can approach the words of that great German philosopher, Elias Canneti:
"The system of orders is accepted universally. It was neatly coined in the armies. But many other spheres of civilised life are dominated and stamped by Order. Death as a threat is the currency of porer. It is easy to pile coin upon coin and accumulate enormous capital. Those who want to reduce power, must look at the order in every signal, without fear, and find the means to take its sting away."
E. Canetti Mass and Power
Another "strange" fact should also be remembered: all these civilian and civilisingproposals come from a politicomilitary organisation. All of this is happening in a country called Mexico where "we are all Marcos." "Zapata is alive," and, in dinner conversations, as the great poet said, "the tablecloth smells of gunpowder." History is coming at us despite the fact that the clerks of power have tried, in vain, to turn this country into the paradise of weak thought. *
International Viewpoint n°274 27
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