Renaissance and the central objective now is the conquest of democracy and ending the party-state
This is the reason why it is possible and necessary to promote a Broad Opposition
Revolution
Front which is very pluralistic not only politically but socially. Plurality means that we can all have particular national projects, even different ones, but that convincing the people to freely support any of them Letter from Radical Democracy to the Bureau of the United requires a different system, it requires the conquest of democracy. Because of this, in spite of our differences, we can all agree in the struggle for democracy and the end of the party-state system.
Therefore those of us who have "the heart, the will and the ideas in the left side of our chest", as the Zapatistas say, know that we have our own project, but that project, to be achieved, requires first the achievement of a common objective, that is to say, democracy, so that we can then struggle under other conditions for our programs. We need, as the document of "The Mirrors" says, a revolution that will 22 International Viewpoint April 1996
Secretariat of the Fouth International Dear comrades,
When the IVth Declaration of the Lancandona Jungle was made public, we didn't have the least problem in expressing in a letter sent to the CCRI-CG of the EZLN our decision to support, with a few qualifications, that document and to incorporate ourselves into the FZLN. And we should point out that one of the qualifications was precisely that we were opposed to the FZLN becoming a front in the classical sense of the term, much less a fusion or co-ordination between the apparatuses of more or less small political organisations. It should, on the contrary, be a new type of political force.This introduction is to remind you that this discussion was not new and that our dissolution had already been voted at our National Conference in September 1995 What we were waiting for was the EZLN's call in order to join in the best way possible.
Il. The profound political motives which led us to this conclusion have been laid out in various documents. We will spell out some of them as examples:
a) The EZLN represents for the country and we believe beyond it, especially in Latin America, a kind of rebirth of rebellion which after the fall of the Berlin wall and the "triumph" of neo-liberalism, emerges as a fresh and subversive will that has immediately won people's sympathy. It is not the same thing to keep on resisting, more or less in isolation, as to apppear as a revolutionary alternative which is credible for broad sectors of the population.
b) The EZLN is the result of an unprecedented process of putting into practice the precept of Jose Carlos Mariategui, 1 that of fusing the best of Europe's emancipatory political thought with the reality and thought of IndoAmerica. The mainly indigenous character of the EZLN is not an argument to throw at those in power; it's a challenge to the old Latin American left which never understood the profound meaning of these communities as centres of anti-capitalist resistance. Nobody, neither the URNG, much less the FMLN, nor the rest of the Latin American left, ourselves included, understood this. On the contrary, our peasant work was always weighed down with aid paternalism which ended up developing into corruption and an adaptation to the modernising ideology of the Mexican state. The opposition of a good part of the main leaders of the PRT's peasant work, and much of the leadership itself, to fighting against the Salinas government's changes to Article 27 of the Constitution 2 in 1991, on the grounds that we had been right to channel the peasant movement into struggles over production rather than land ownership, were only the tip of the iceberg of something very profound going on in the thinking of the c) The EZLN was born as a result of the failure of all the projects of the left, especially our own. The PRT was undoubtedly a project which succeeded in drawing the attention of the most important social vanguard in Mexico. Through its ranks passed thousands of Mexicans who represented the best of a generation of revolutionaries. Nonetheless, it was the victim of a process of institutionalisation on the part of the state and of a growing pragmatism which led it to confront problems in terms of obtaining a series of seeming "successes" which encouraged self-delusion as well as the organisation's stagnation and subsequent crisis. The emergence of opportunist currents by the time the crisis broke out has nothing to do with any supposedly intrinsic vices on the part of those concerned but rather with these two aspects which closed in like pincers on our revolutionary project.
d) The EZLN was born beyond the bounds of the Mexican state and on the edge of civil society. It put forward a policy which it was impossible for the regime to recuperate, which combined a strong dose of ethical opposition to the system along with a very flexible policy of mobilisation and broad unity, starting from the existing level of awareness of large sections of the population, fed up with corruption, with parties, with the government and with impunity. In other words, from some of the premises of neo-liberal ideology it took a few fault lines and action proposals with which to bombard the same neo-liberal ideology. That is why it won so much sympathy when it said explicitly that it was against the taking of power by a political organization and against the participation in the ranks of the FZLN of people who hold elected office as popular representatives in state institutions imagine how popular that is: a member of congress earns 28 thousand new pesos a month, not counting a series of other benefits, whilst the minimum wage is 600 pesos); or when it said that the FZLN will not be an organisation which enters into any kind of "arrangement" with state institutions and the like.
e) Because of the work we have carried out since 1st January 1994 (for us it was all the easier to understand the significance of the indigenous rebellion because of the position we'd adopted over the reforms to Article 27, over the development of corruption within the left, because of our refusal to seek electoral registration and our refusal to accept money from the state, especially that which was given under the table and with no legal basis - all this before Ist January 1994), because of our work with Rosario Ibarra, because of the seriousness with which we took our relationship with comrades of the EZLN, etc., the conditions have been favourable for a political relationship which has had to be understandable elements of mistrust on their part. From the beginning we sought a relationship of mutual respect, based on our own self-respect. We presented ourselves for what we were; without exaggerating our strength, we always told them we were a small force of revolutionary militants with a was not and is not negotiable.
Ill. We discussed the possibility of incorporating DR into the FZLN with the Zapatista comrades. They expressed their interest but suggested that this would be impossible without ourselves disappearing
Mexico * first. The reasons are obvious. The answer which won in the National Consultation (referendum) was Number 4, that's to say that the FZLN should be built based on the EZLN (and not as a front of organisations, as in option number 5 which was defeated -Translator's note). But what is more, the only possibility of building a new political force is to do it in this way - we should not lose sight of the extent to which the old politicians of the Mexican left, especially the most prominent amongst them, have been repudiated by popular movement activists.
The people interested in forming the FZLN want to discuss all the basic documents and organisational questions of the FZLN on an equal footing, not with currents that are already organized and likely to be highly manipulative. The FZLN will be, as has been pointed out, a political organization of a new type and not a front of organizations, but it WILL be, as has also been said, a front of points of view. Nobody is being asked to renounce or go back on their theory or their ideas. In the FZLN there can be communists, trotskyists, Maoists, anarchists or people with no ideology, said recently the " SubComandante Marcos...?Our decision to take this step is allowing various of our comrades to play an important role in building the FZLN. But the way we see this is not in terms of the past, but of the future. As we eliminate our organisational boundaries we do not care who is doing the work nor do we seek to promote former comrades of ours but only to guarantee that the best comrades, regardless of where they came from, take on the central tasks. Obviously the quality of our ex-members means that several of them are centrally involved.
We are on the path to forging a new political identity. We do not renounce our ideas, but nor do we
International Viewpoint n° 276 23
the labor movement," while calling upon the unions to maintain their "historic alli-
* Mexico have the blind faith in them which we had before. We are on the road to the formation of a civilian Zapatista movement which will be plebeian, radical and socialist. We know you will recall that in other countries similar things have been said. But the difference is that these proposals are being made outside of any state institution, and beyond any of the traditional apparatuses of international control. These two aspects are no small thing. You cannot compare this with what has happened in other countries; this is not a fusion between two far-left groups or between communist currents and the far-left. Here we are building something new on the basis of the most radical and revolutionary current in recent years, and which has mass influence in fundamental sections of Mexican society. DR has been the first organization to take this step.
To do so, we have had to decide on our organisational separation from the IVth International. This was the price we had to pay and it was certainly the most painful. Once the FZLN has been formed, we will discuss within it the kind of international relations it should establish, as well as the relationship its members maintain with international organizations. The EZLN's position is to maintain fraternal relations with all international currents and to work towards the structuring of a new international which they define as the international of hope. Whilst the FZLN is taking form and these discussions are in course, we will continue to orient our action on the basis of the programme of the IVth International and the theory of revolutionary marxism, struggling for the elimination of exploitation and oppression in all its forms, for the organization of free men and women freely associated, against