To Lead by Obeying

“And all of this is not a model. You won’t find it in a printed book. It’s simply present in each of our hearts and in the way of thinking of our peoples.”

Speech by Karina, from Caracol 1, at the Round Table on the Other Health, First Gathering of the Zapatista Peoples with the Peoples of the World, December 31, 2006.

The book the reader currently holds is comprised of two sections which, while intimately connected, are nonetheless different. The first section comprises an argument which attempts to characterize, in global terms and from a clearly accepted standpoint focused on the horizons of the historical longue durée, that which could be considered the essential features of the Mexican neo-Zapatista movement, as a model example or paradigmatic case of the new antisystemic movements which have developed across planet Earth in the last 25 years.

This is thus a characterization of the deep essence and general features permanent in neo-Zapatismo. Taking as its pretext the First Gathering of the Zapatista Peoples with the Peoples of the World, held in 2006 and 2007, the book’s first section explores the fundamental principles of this unprecedented and original Mexican indigenous movement with regard to the most crucial and discussed issues in the contemporary debates of the vast family of antisystemic movements across the world.

Relying on this general definition of the permanent and general features of neo-Zapatismo, the second section of the book (comprised of the nine Appendices included here) focuses on precisely and pointedly analyzing neo-Zapatista understandings of particular issues and the various initiatives which this movement of the indigenous rebels of the state of Chiapas has promoted and developed over the last 15 years.

While the first section functions as the general framework and underlying foundations of the second, the second section allows for various elements of the first, which have been formulated only briefly or generally in the first section, to be specified, contextualized, and deeply analyzed. For example, while in the first section the original and innovative ideas of neo-Zapatismo on the human activity of politics are developed broadly and in detail, in the second section (in Appendix 1) the complex issue of the neo-Zapatista stance on power, powers, and counterpower is dealt with more profoundly.¹

For neo-Zapatismo, that which is wrong and must be totally transformed is the entire world of what is currently political activity in general, with its structural elitism (its definition as a matter for the few), its episodic character (defined by limited electoral periods), its perverse hierarchy of leading by commanding, and its deceitful identification of politics with ‘sites of power’ (such as presidential palaces, parliament buildings, or party headquarters) and with all the ridiculous rituals and empty paraphernalia that surround the phony sanctification of contemporary politics. Without understanding this, it is impossible to adequately understand neo-Zapatismo’s radical critique of the strategy of simply conquering the presently existing state apparatus though elections or even through a triumphant social revolution. Neo-Zapatismo instead proposes to modify—radically and from below—the conditions themselves in which state power is exerted and endured. This radical position towards power and politics displays all of its importance and current relevance in light of the successive failures of all the so-called progressive governments of Latin America. By limiting themselves to simply winning the state apparatus through elections, these governments were left completely unable to effect substantial change in their respective countries, leaving capitalism and all its poverty, injustice, plunder, exploitation, and essential inequalities untouched.

Likewise, while in the first section the general features of the project of a non-capitalist ‘alternative modernity’ are defined—a modernity which the Maya peoples of Chiapas have embodied for centuries and which today they defiantly present as an alternative to the dominant, decaying capitalist modernity—in the second section it becomes possible to develop much more profoundly and from a much closer distance the subject (developed in Appendix 5) of the ‘we-ist’ understanding that the neo-Zapatistas still maintain and defend today. This ‘we-ism’ affirms that the collective ‘we’ must always prevail over the individual ‘I’ and must even be the primary foundation and support of the greatest, most varied, and richest process of general expansion and flowering of individuality itself.

This understanding not only attacks capitalist, possessive, egotistical individualism at its core but also reinforces the idea once formulated by Marx that true individual freedom is only possible through and with the mediation and aid of collective freedom, and vice versa. Furthermore, this conception of the predominance of ‘we’ over ‘I’ has now shown its great potential when we bear in mind that the number of COVID-19 deaths in neo-Zapatista communities has been quite low (and indeed practically insignificant). This, according to the Zapatistas themselves, is due in part to the fact that they confronted this pandemic in a collective, not individual, manner, as well as to their emphasis on preventing disease over curing it.

Likewise, it is by understanding that Mexican neo-Zapatismo is a direct heir of the rich movement of 1968 in Mexico and of the profound cultural revolution which this movement entailed in our country (as happened, moreover, across the entire world) that it is also possible to understand neo-Zapatismo’s profound and lasting impact in current social science (Appendix 6), as well as its significant contribution to the development of contemporary critical thought (addressed in detail in Appendix 7). This contribution to critical thought allows for the radical reconsideration and renewal of both contemporary political and sociological theory, granting us new, much richer and more complex definitions of politics, democracy, autonomy, freedom, and government, as well as definitions of the new forms of social exclusion, the new mechanisms of economic dispossession, the new strata of the social pyramid, the complex and varied relations between the social ‘above’ and the multiple ‘belows,’ of hierarchy, power, powers, and micro-powers, and of many more phenomena which have yet to be synthesized and discovered in a more careful and rigorous manner.