The Neo-Zapatistas brought in the New Year
of 1994 with an insurrectionary spirit that
the Mexican government was all too certain
had been stamped out years before. The Partido
Revolucionario Institucional was supposed
to be the fulfillment of all revolutionary
energy left over from the struggles of the
1910s. Yet while the PRI’s politicians spectacularly
rang in the New Year, an army of mostly Mayan
campesinos was storming San Cristobal de Las
Casas and other cities in Southern Mexico
with arms in hand. Shocked news media rushed
to cover the story, acting as if the Zapatistas
were something new instead of part of a long
tradition of indigenous, anti-capitalist rebels
drawing inspiration from their traditional
culture and historical figures like Emiliano
Zapata and the anarchist Flores Magón brothers.
In the years since the Neo-Zapatista rebellion
in 1994, autonomous communities in Chiapas,
Mexico have built a society that marks the
realization of many of the dreams Ricardo
Flores Magón envisioned in 1911. They have
rejected electoralism and the state as a vehicle
for revolutionary practice, expropriated private
property for communal benefit, and built self-governing
communities where the ultimate authority lies
with the people themselves.
As a small band of guerillas from Mexico City
holed up in the mountains, their vanguardist
views of social revolution were transformed
by their close interactions with Mayan communal
custom. They were forced to develop a critique
of state power previously voiced by anarchists
like Ricardo Flores Magón. The founding cadre
of what would become the Ejército Zapatista
de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) arrived to
the Lacandon Jungle in 1982. Their politics
were deeply rooted in the Marxist-Leninist
tradition and as a guerilla movement, they
had as their central aim the “overthrowing
[of the] regime and the taking of power by
the people”. Subcomandante Marcos, the famous
spokesperson for the EZLN, herein referred
to as the Zapatistas, refers to their initial
proposal as “completely undemocratic and
authoritarian”. This position clashed with
the indigenous tradition of collective defense,
collective living, and collective governance
in the area, until many community members
joined the EZLN and the indigenous forms of
decision-making won out. Although the Zapatistas
quickly shed the idea of themselves being
the vanguard of the revolution, they carried
their longings for state power with them into
the early days of their armed uprising. As
the drive to Mexico City became militarily
unfeasible, the Zapatistas once again had
to respond to practical necessity. This temporary
delay in their plans seemingly morphed into
an ideological distrust of the state. Marcos
reflected this self-critical shift in the
Zapatista position at a public event in August
1994, announcing their principle of “proposing,
not imposing” and clarifying that “we
neither want, nor are we able, to occupy the
place that some hope we will occupy”. Marcos’
statement signaled an acceptance that a Zapatista
government in Mexico City was neither feasible
nor desirable, a view solidified 16 months
later in The Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon
Jungle, when the Zapatistas announced themselves
as a “political force which struggles against
the State-Party system...which does not struggle
to take political power.” A rejection of
seizing state power represented a significant
shift from the Marxist-Leninist dogma that
Marcos and his comrades carried with them
into the jungle.
Nearly a century before the Zapatistas revolted
in Chiapas, Ricardo Flores Magón declared
himself an anarchist, an enemy to all hierarchical
power relationships. The Zapatistas reject
all of the traditional labels of ideology:
marxist, anarchist, communist alike. In many
ways they have synthesized elements of many
ideologies on the left with traditionally-held
Mayan beliefs. Their preference for decentralized
and horizontal relations between people places
them firmly in Magón and the Mexican Liberal
Party’s legacy. Magón and the anarchists
made it clear in their paper, Regeneración,
as well as in their 1911 manifesto, that power
corrupts all who take it, no matter how “well-intentioned
[they] may be” and that placing someone
in power was a wasted effort. In this spirit,
the Neo-Zapatistas hoped to build a Mexico
“of those who don’t build ladders to climb
above others, but who look beside them to
find another and make him or her their compañero
or compañera”. The anarchists in the Mexican
Liberal Party, “convinced that political
liberty does not benefit the poor but only
the palace hunters”, lashed out at all who
sought to get elected. Magón had a penchant
for direct action, evidenced often through
military raids on border towns and expropriations
during strikes, and it is likely that he would
have seen the Zapatistas who smashed polling
stations during the “sham” 1997 Congressional
elections as a favorable development. He grew
to despise anyone who sought to govern, whether
they proclaimed themselves revolutionary or
not. The Liberal Party had shifted from a
reformist party to a revolutionary organization
towards the end of the reign of Porfirio Díaz,
and Magón became dismayed by Francisco Madero’s
retaining of all the mechanisms of the Porfirian
state. Most scandalously, the Mexican military,
with Madero at the head, crushed the anarchist
rebellion of Baja California in 1911. Magón
declared war on all future governors. To him,
there were two choices: “a new yoke” or
“life-redeeming expropriation” of all
who sought rulership. The Zapatistas, like
Flores Magón, knew that freedom was not the
ability to “change masters every six years”,
but the “extension of [participation] to
all areas of life”, in other words, total
autonomy. Both the Mexican Liberal Party and
the EZLN became disillusioned with state power
through experience and self-criticism, and
once they did, sought new forms of organization
that empowered all those affected by decisions
to be the ones making them.
At the heart of both Ricardo Flores Magón
and the Zapatistas’ analysis of the world
of stark contrasts they found themselves in
was an abolitionist critique of capitalism
and an expropriative prescription for its
cure. Both drew on the Marxist evaluation
of capitalism as a system pitting two diametrically
opposed classes against each other. They saw
the realities of this class struggle in daily
life as hacendados or their corporate successors
tended to subsume more and more of the communal
sphere into the private one, dispossessing
farmers and forcing them to sell their labor
for a wage. Finally, both saw their end goal
as a world where the maxim “Everything for
Everyone” is put into practice. The main
difference between the Zapatistas and Magónistas
can be found in the speed at which the old
society is to be destroyed and the new one
is to be built. Ricardo Flores Magón, by
all accounts, was indigenous himself and grew
up moving between indigenous ejidos. Enrique,
Ricardo’s brother, recounted the land around
them as being owned communally, and tended
through shared work. He explained before a
Los Angeles jury that he and his brother were
“communist anarchists” because they were
“Indians, proletarians...witnesses of the
great injustices”. Ricardo looked fondly
on a idyllic memory of his time in indigenous
communities that possessed and worked in common
the land, governed not by authority but by
mutual support. He lamented the capitalist
system, in which “each man had to compete
with another to put a piece of bread in his
mouth” for “snatching the natural riches”
away from them “for the benefit of the neighboring
landholders”. For Ricardo, the Mexican Liberal
Party’s 1911 manifesto was a “moral guide”
to be adopted by the indigenous and all other
proletarians. Even as far back as the 1906
Manifesto, a much more reformist Liberal plan,
he “called for restoring lands to the Yaqui
in Sonora and to the Maya on the Yucatan peninsula”.
As an anarchist, he would reject the idea
that the government or anybody else should
be the one to expropriate the lands for the
Maya. He would instead urge the Maya to seize
the land themselves from the landowners, and
he cheered on this very occurrence during
the Mexican Revolution, where “the proletariat
has taken possession of the land without waiting
for a paternal government”. This is, of
course, exactly what the Maya would do in
1994 under the banner of the EZLN.
Even before the rebellion, the indigenous
Mayans living in the Lacandon Jungle began
small-scale expropriations. During the ten
years of military and social preparation leading
up to the rebellion, campesinos went unarmed
and seized land left untended by absentee
landlords. They built houses on the land and
work it in common. For this, they faced brutal,
and often collective, punishment. The Maya
had been given some of the rockiest and worst
soil in the decades after the Mexican Revolution.
The best soil was owned by wealthy landlords
running near-feudal operations in conditions
not much better than those before the Revolution.
Under the conditions of the North American
Free Trade Agreement, set to go into effect
on January 1, 1994, the article in the Mexican
Constitution which protected traditional communal
landholdings, ejidos, was nullified and NAFTA
opened up the little holdings the Maya had
to potential corporate exploitation. There
is a reason the EZLN chose the same day to
rise up. Their first task was the expropriation
of land that had been privatized. Between
the land the Zapatistas freed by force and
the land left open by fleeing owners, “some
340 private farms representing 50,000 hectares”
were seized in the first six months of 1994
alone. The EZLN, never ones to shy away from
self-criticism, admitted that the progress
of bringing the seized lands under collective
work was slow going, but “the land problem”
improved significantly in the years since
then.
Even the Zapatistas stopped short of Flores
Magón’s radical demands for a redistribution
of all the means of life through thoroughgoing
expropriations. Flores Magón would have welcomed
the rebellion in Chiapas but would have criticized
them for not going far enough. He called for
“all the industries...stores...and houses”
to be taken over by those who work or live
in them. As long as any means of production,
distribution, or exchange remained in the
hands of a boss, people would still be exploited.
While the Zapatistas did not totally abolish
capitalist relations in their territories,
they facilitated the continual growth of cooperative
workplaces and collectively-worked plots.
Faced with exploitation from all sides since
the first Spanish ship landed in the “New
World”, indigenous people have had little
choice but to build a culture of cooperation,
the “only means of survival, resistance,
dignity, and defiance” in stark contrast
to the “capitalist precept of ‘a lot in
the hands of the few’”. Collective work
was an ancient practice that was strong in
Chiapas prior to the rebellion, even noted
by Ricardo Flores Magón in several writings.
During the clandestine period in the ten years
prior to the uprising, “the compañeros
combined our work in corn, bean, chicken and
sheep production”, doing “everything in
work collectives, almost as if it were socialism.”
After the rebellion, many compañeros “went
to recuperated lands...in collectives to work
and to plant”. These collectives were largely
formed through self-organization out of necessity,
not at the behest of any authority. Collective
work in Zapatista territory is not ordered
by anybody; it comes out of a cohesion “born
in community, of people living in each other’s
shadows… an intrinsic form of community
harmony”. Fascinatingly, part of the produce
of collective agricultural work has been put
into a fund to pay for the transportation
costs of community members who need to leave
the village, buy seeds, or to cover the needs
of the education promoters (teachers) and
health promoters (doctors).
It is unlikely that Ricardo Flores Magón
could have predicted just how dependent the
neoliberalization of capital would make the
world, even rebel communities, on the market.
The Zapatistas have not been able to abolish
money, nor have they been able to completely
isolate themselves from the capitalist economy.
While internally much of their work is structured
non-hierarchically, with the workers themselves,
making the decisions over what is produced,
how workers are paid, and the like, neoliberalism
has destroyed the ability for the vast majority
of people, including Zapatista cooperatives,
to be self-sustaining. Neoliberal ideology
has done this by incentivizing the destruction
and/or privatization of resources and forcing
localities into the export economy. The Mexican
government has also carried out economic warfare
on the Zapatistas by providing special resources
to non-Zapatista indigenous communities and
making it impossible for Zapatistas to compete
with state-subsidized industries. Despite
these pressures, Zapatistas found ways to
survive while resisting privatization by selling
specialty products like coffee globally, protecting
local seeds, and attracting workers by giving
them autonomy. Also, many communities opened
cooperative stores, regional groceries that
sell cheaply in bulk and are self-managed
by community members. The return to more widespread
collective work also meant a blurring of gendered
work, a goal reflected in the Women’s Revolutionary
Law, one of the first binding precedents put
forth by Zapatista communities. The unique
circumstances faced by Mayans in the late
20th century meant that the Zapatistas have
had to slowly build a society where “everything
is for everyone”, community by community.
They have by no means reached Ricardo Flores
Magón’s goal of a fully stateless, classless,
moneyless society, but they made major steps
towards it in collectivizing land, the building
of houses, and transportation.
The Neo-Zapatistas had to work out many of
the practical points that for Magón only
existed in the theoretical, adopting a form
of consensus decision-making and rotating
delegates for their self-organization. Magón
was never able to successfully put his ideas
into practice in the long-term and true to
anarchist form, he avoided being too prescriptive
in his writings about what a free society
might actually look like. Probably the part
of the Mexican Liberal Party’s ideas on
anarchist communism that was least fleshed
out was the way that decisions were to be
made on a large scale non-hierarchically.
One can only surmise that Flores Magón would
propose some system of worker’s councils
and neighborhood councils, linked together
through a bottom-up federalism of recallable
delegates. In late 1915, Ricardo wrote an
article in his newspaper called “New Life”,
a playful imagining of some potential actions
people might take in a random city in the
hours after a revolutionary wave kicked out
the capitalists from the city. In it, he imagines
smooth and quick decisions made “when authority
does not intervene”. He does not say exactly
who comes to these decisions, but in the absence
of authority, one has to assume that all who
are affected can have a say. He envisions
each neighborhood as an autonomous unit, with
“an expropriated automobile” unifying
“the resolutions made in each city neighborhood”.
If neighborhoods are to work together, someone
would have to take it upon themselves to be
a mouthpiece for each neighborhood, what Ricardo
calls “volunteer commissioners”. To be
truly anarchist, these commissioners could
not be allowed to accrue power over people,
but Flores Magón never really laid out how
they would formally operate. The Zapatistas
came up with a possible solution in the early
days following their uprising in 1994. They
“made the road by walking”; only in practice
could they work out the theoretical. They
built on the indigenous tradition of communal
decision-making rooted in consensus. Anarchists
in recent decades have drawn inspiration from
indigenous groups, Quakers, and student assemblies
and adopted consensus decision-making but
most of Ricardo Flores Magón’s contemporaries
advocated direct democracy, usually ⅔ vote
with anyone able to freely associate or disassociate
with the group at any time. Consensus allows
all of the power to remain with those who
are most affected and eliminates the tyranny
of the majority. The Zapatistas adopted rotating
delegates to coordinate between neighborhoods
on a municipal level, and put into place additional
delegates to coordinate municipalities on
a territory-wide level. Through long processes
of consensus in which all community members
on the most local level had to ratify every
proposal, they worked out a term limit of
10–14 days for the delegates to the Junta
Buen Gobierno, the territory-wide coordination
meetings. These stunningly short terms in
positions of influence ensured that no one
could establish power over anyone, hoard funds,
or sway balance of resources to particular
communities. Another way the Zapatistas kept
these delegates accountable to their communities
was by making them volunteers, compensated
only by their neighbors taking over their
home responsibilities while they are away,
and ensuring that they can be immediately
recalled if they go against the mandate of
their community. In other words, these “collective
and removable” delegates formalize the Mayan
tradition of “leading by obeying”.
On the surface, “leading by obeying” does
not seem at all compatible with the anarchism
that Ricardo Flores Magón espoused nearly
100 years before. In actuality, anarchists
have not been so much opposed to leadership
as they have rulership and domination. Magón
would have likely found a lot to admire in
the Zapatistas’ system; the delegates do
not actually have much power over their communities,
but instead are mouthpieces of their community’s
collective will. Unlike the politicians Magón
so hated, Zapatista delegates cannot go against
what everyday people demand. They are bound
to the decisions made in consensus at the
most local level. The Zapatistas have a slogan:
“Here the people command and the government
obeys”. Possibly contrary to the rapidity
Ricardo Flores Magón had in mind when imagining
decision-making in the absence of authority,
anti-authoritarian decisions often have to
be made over several meetings. For example,
during negotiations for a ceasefire with the
Mexican state in the days following New Year’s
1994, the functionaries of the EZLN made clear
they would have to “interrupt the talks
to consult the villages to which they were
accountable”. When returning home to their
villages, the functionaries were expected
“not to talk, but to listen”. Indigenous
Mayans have been making decisions collectively
for generations without needing instruction
from leftist intellectuals. Ultimately, the
revolutionaries who came to the mountains
in 1982 learned more from the indigenous villagers
than the villagers learned from them. Yet
the Zapatistas represent a synthesis of indigenous
practice and theory drawn from the political
left. Subcomandante Marcos quoted Ricardo
Flores Magón in speeches, noting that history
was repeating itself, though the Zapatistas
were facing an even more determined and well-equipped
enemy than Ricardo could have ever imagined.
Still, it is doubtful that Flores Magón could
have come up with a more anti-authoritarian
way of making decisions over such a large
territory. The Zapatistas, through years of
trial and error came up with a form of decision-making
that allows each person living in their autonomous
zone a meaningful say in the decisions that
affect their life. The positions of influence
in Zapatista communities are not so much authorities
as they are expressions of the demands of
the people. There is no doubt that practice
is in line with the anarchist sensibilities
of Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican Liberal
Party.
The Zapatistas seized a moment in history
that Ricardo Flores Magón never could. Facing
the longest lasting one-party dictatorship
in the world and a capitalist system so much
more entrenched than in Magón’s day, the
EZLN could not implement Magón’s vision
of a great overnight revolution. As they walked
forward in rebellion, they kept their ears
firmly on the people in their communities,
listening for cues on what to do next. Clearly,
the old blueprints for revolution were out-of-date;
the indigenous people suffering under the
crushing weight of capitalism with its daily
indignities could not wait for the glorious
Millenarian upheaval. Their clandestine waiting
bought them time that the Mexican Liberal
Party never had and once they began; they
had to figure out the theoretical paths envisioned
by Ricardo Flores Magón as they went. The
EZLN avoided the pitfalls of so many mass
social movements by refusing to get sucked
into party politics, carrying forward Magón’s
distrust of politicians and rejecting the
state as a vehicle of power that could bring
liberatory results. Though this rejection
of state power had to come as part of an evolving
process, it left the Zapatistas in a position
that was hard to co-opt. The massive expropriations
of private farms, previously worked by many
barely compensated indigenous hands, could
not be controlled by the PRI or any other
party and once Zapatista territory had been
carved out, thousands of people residing there
refused to have any contact with the government.
Though they were not able to abolish the state
as Magón would have hoped, the Zapatistas
created a dual power to the state that effectively
made the state unnecessary. By working collectively
and building cooperative stores, farms, and
means of transport, they built on indigenous
communal traditions but expanded closer towards
the anarchist dream of a stateless and classless
society. While Flores Magón never fully laid
out a plan of what mass decision-making free
from authority would look like, the Zapatistas
captured the essence of an anti-authoritarian
governance by implementing a system of bottom-up
power with instructed and rotating delegates
capable of coordinating resources over vast
swaths of mountainous terrain. The experiment
of the Zapatistas to build “a world where
many worlds fit” is an ongoing process,
but in a few short decades they have already
realized many of the libertarian dreams of
Ricardo Flores Magón.
