Presented on May 30, 2017 at the Society for Socialist Studies Conference, held at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario
Abstract
The disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students is exemplary of Mexico’s crisis, which is rooted in fundamental, global contradictions of capitalism outlined by David Harvey. In this article, I respond to the Zapatistas’ suggestion to see capitalism as the many-headed Hydra, which I use to argue that capitalism is war. Mexico’s war on drugs provides a historical explanation of how this has come to be, as it was the end of a period of class compromise and expanded reproduction, transitioning towards the fusion of government, military, and licit and illicit business in pursuit of accumulation by dispossession. Clearance and re-ordering of territory and hyperexploitation through terror are the ways the war on drugs achieves this. In these ways the apparent failure of the war on drugs has been a success for accumulation by dispossession. I conclude by arguing that Zapatista autonomy is a strategic inspiration for how to respond to capitalism as war by building freedom.
Introduction
Ayotzinapa is exemplary of Mexico’s crisis. The ‘Normal School,’ or teachers’ college, of Ayotzinapa was founded in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Free, public education was enshrined in the revolutionary constitution of 1917, yet the rural communities that had fought with Zapata and Villa for land and liberty had few trained teachers, so Normal schools were founded across Mexico, with the admission requirement that aspiring teachers come from the same poor communities they would serve. Fast-forward to the night of September 26, 2014, when Ayotzinapa students went to the city of Iguala, Guerrero to requisition commercial busses to take them to the annual march commemorating the massacre carried out by the Mexican government on October 2, 1968 in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Plaza. As the students left Iguala in five busses, they suffered a systematic attack by a combined force of municipal police officers, cartel members, and military soldiers in which six students were killed and 43 were disappeared. The C-4 security system, which integrates local, state, and federal police intelligence with that of the army, marines, and national public security system, surveilled the students from the moment they arrived in Iguala. Yet, in the days after the mass disappearance and massacre, the government’s investigation not only systematically mis-handled evidence, failed to follow potential leads, and tortured its preferred suspects. This is all standard, in the five per cent of homicides that are actually investigated (Gibler 2011: 40). Instead the federal investigation, led by Mexico’s Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam, made every attempt not to include C-4 information in the investigation and to destroy evidence regarding the existence of a fifth bus intercepted at the Chipote bridge. Furthermore, the army’s 27th Battalion is stationed in Iguala, was party to the C-4 monitoring, and the direct participation of its soldiers in the night’s events is documented. This is the same battalion that was responsible for the most disappearances during Mexico’s Dirty War of the 1970s. Battalion 27, along with Guerrero’s other army barracks, at all the exit points from the state’s mountainous interior, which is the Western hemisphere’s most important heroine production center, the source of 42% of all Mexico’s heroine, which is estimated to yield ten billion US dollars annually. The commander of this battalion was never questioned during the investigation, nor were any of his subordinates, save a very few foot soldiers. Instead, two months after the disappearance, the commander was promoted to control Guerrero’s new Unified Command, integrating local, state, and federal police with the army and marines. Despite the government’s best efforts to hide it, all evidence points to a tragedy where a group of teenage students mistakenly requisitioned a bus loaded with heroine, were intercepted through a systematic cordoning of the city of Iguala coordinated by the army and carried out by municipal police and cartel members (who are, in the end, the same), and then murdered, mutilated, and disappeared in a message of terror. (1)
If the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students is exemplary of Mexico’s crisis, what sort of crisis are we talking about? Is “crisis” simply synonymous with terror and corruption, a way of describing things gone terribly wrong? As Marxists, we must understand the concept of crisis dialectically, as the heightening of a contradiction, as two countervailing social and material forces that both oppose each other and depend on each other. There is a crisis between workers and capitalists when the wealthy abandon sagging profit-via-production in favour of profit-via-theft, only to increasingly destroy the social fabric of the workers who remain the foundation of the economy. There is a crisis between capitalism and the planet when the bloated economy must add yet another three per cent year after year, lest it fall into recession and put us all out of work, and we are thereby forced to support the pillage of a planet in ecological decline. We must grasp the broad contours of contradictions without losing sight of the violent human impact of these forces. In this essay I will begin with the broad contradictions we are facing at this conjuncture of capitalist history and then return to how they are playing out in Mexico.
Following the Zapatistas’ suggestion to understand capitalism as a many-headed Hydra, I will argue that Mexico’s crisis is part and parcel of this transition from capital accumulation through expanded reproduction to accumulation by dispossession, which can simply be understood as capitalism as war. This analysis is based on David Harvey’s explanation of capitalism’s core contradictions (2014). Given that these are the contradictions of a global system, Mexico’s crisis is similar to those of many other countries. In generations past, these countries were labelled the “Third World,” but the crisis of capitalism as war is increasingly the situation for those of us in the First World too. As Malcolm X famously quipped, “The chickens come home to roost” (1987). I will first explore the contradictions propelling this transition and then look at how they have created a political economy of war. Next, following Dawn Paley’s compelling analysis of “drug war capitalism” (2014), I will show how these general trends have been articulated historically through the war on drugs, which I consider to be a “Pyrrhic loss” (Reiman 2004). Finally, to avoid falling into cynicism, I will argue that we cannot negotiate a smaller or less violent war with capitalism and its administrators in government. Instead, we must build freedom amongst our communities, on our own terms, otherwise known as autonomy. The Zapatistas have had amazing success in building autonomy despite the war against them, and this should inspire the rest of us to build autonomy in our own spaces, in our own ways.
The Hydra and accumulation by dispossession
The story begins with the momentary resolution of the last major economic crisis, after a half-century of depression and world war when a compromise was reached that subdued capitalism’s contradictions. This period is given the labels of “Fordist production,” “the welfare state,” or “import substitution industrialization.” Italian autonomist Mario Tronti said that during this period society had become a giant factory (1966), where cities, the ways people relate to each other, and their hopes and dreams had all been redirected to support a crooked compromise: that everyone should play their part in the production process and receive meager wages and a minimum guarantee of social services in return for creating immense wealth for the few. In Mexico, this took the form of welfare measures in the major industrial centres, land redistribution, and a few subsidies and price controls for peasants. Against the compromise, Tronti’s strategic proposal was refusal, to stop passively accepting the welfare state’s crumbs. Workers should refuse the compromise and take over the factory. 1968 was the culmination of this refusal, but by the 1980s this high point seemed ever more distant as the owners ended up being the ones to coordinate their own collective refusal. Capitalism’s great refusal is called neoliberalism, and it has systematically undermined workers’ stability in favour of precarity (Graeber 2012), so that people will take what little they can get without ever being confident they will have it for long. However, more and more of these workers are simply superfluous in the eyes of capital (Davis 2006). With much of the world’s population relegated to the status of an under- and unemployed reserve army of labour, capitalists are much more interested in the natural resources these superfluous people happen to be living on. Given neoliberalism’s wild success in instituting precarity and spreading sweatshop conditions around the world, capitalists can readily find cheap labour and have little motivation to improve the means of production. Instead, business progressively enlists government as its “means of dispossession” so that it can continue to displace people, steal natural resources, and then pay the displaced a pittance once they have moved to the city (Galeano 2015: 289). Instead of a capital-labour compromise, there are relations of naked force.
Capital’s great refusal and turn to accumulation by dispossession lend a unique shape today’s greatest contradictions. They are the contradictions of global capitalism, manifest heterogeneously over an uneven geography. In their 2015 “encounter” called Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra (Sixth Commission 2015), the EZLN invited academics such as Adolfo Gilly, Pablo González Casanova, Silvia Federici, Raul Zibechi, and Paulina Fernández to Chiapas to share their analyses of this global crisis and its manifestations in Mexico. Zapatista subcomandantes Galeano (formerly Marcos) and Moisés proposed the mythical many-headed Hydra as a theme for reflection, observing that the Hydra feeds on death and destruction, that its many heads mean it dominates in many ways, and when these heads are severed they simply re-grow to a more ferocious size (Galeano 2015: 210-222). In Mexico these severed heads are those once involved in the class compromise: the PRI party-state, small and medium-scale business (including small and medium-scale illicit business), and the national market (Galeano 2015: 232). New, more deadly heads have emerged as the war on drugs, militarization and paramilitarization, and a narco-state at the service at the service of capital, which is indistinguishable from narco-capital. Yet the Hydra also has a mother-head, its most fundamental and ravenous one, which is the private ownership of the common wealth. Subcomandante Galeano writes that, to defeat the Hydra, to end its mutation into ever-more monstrous forms, we must trace the Hydra’s footprints to understand where it has come from and how it has grown. In more academic language, the Hydra is capitalism and its footprints are its genealogy, its transformations through capitalism’s laws of motion, its crisis-ridden political and economic structures, it solutions to its contradictions. (2)
Surveying the Hydra’s footprints, Subcomandante Galeano finds there are countless ways war is an apt metaphor for capitalism (2015: 314-316). Original accumulation, the clearing of land to create a reserve army of labour and the amassing of this land to convert it into capital, can only be accomplished by violence. War is what “liberated” the working class from the means of production. War is also capitalism’s best solution to recessions. It allows business, government, science, and society to articulate a single project of voracious consumption, the destruction of old value, and the single-minded production of new value, all while taking on debt. War sucks up soldiers, munitions, and territory, leaving rubble and skeletons, allowing a double profit: the production and equipping of an army and the reconstruction of all that was razed. Galeano concludes his reflections on the Hydra saying it is not capitalism’s existence that provokes wars; it is war (2015: 315). War is not simply a metaphor for capitalism, a discreet entity that can be likened to it as to shed new light. War does not simply provide profits, it becomes the gears of the entire profit-generating enterprise and it makes them moves. War is the means and end of capitalism.
To understand why capitalism is war, I will pivot from Subcomandante Galeano to David Harvey (2014). First, it is important to understand that accumulation by dispossession is fundamental to capitalism and not merely an “original” stage prior to mercantilist and industrial development. Indeed, dispossession comprises half of many of capitalism’s most central contradictions. One is that capitalism depends on the private ownership of the common wealth (Harvey 2014: 53-61). Harvey explains that wealth can only be created socially, through the collaboration of workers, and this common wealth must become private capital if the system of value creation, profit, reinvestment, and greater value creation is to function. Galeano makes this same point in identifying private property as the Hydra’s mother-head. This private appropriation of the common wealth can happen in the “traditional” way (the only way liberal economists consider in their models), by turning the common wealth into commodities that are sold by the capitalist. This is accomplished via the legalized theft of paying workers a meager wage for the value they have created. Private appropriation can also be accomplished through more explicit theft: by making people work under conditions of near or outright slavery, or by stealing the land, water, minerals, energy, and transportation resources needed to produce and circulate these commodities. Both are forms of dispossession, but the latter is frequently ignored in theories of capitalism. Harvey observes that the Great Transformation (Polanyi 2001) was the massive theft of land that left the dispossessed with little option but to offer the fruits of their labour up for waged theft by the capitalist, and he is quick to add that this process has not ended (2014: 60). Neoliberalism is an intensification of the Great Transformation, as land continues to be privatized, and other areas of life are also violently brought onto the marketplace, including housing, healthcare, war-making, and government. If we agree accumulation by dispossession is fundamental to capitalism, it is easy to understand that capitalism is war. If war is the violent pursuit of power at the behest of humanity, the seizure of resources by force of arms, wealth through murder, it is indeed synonymous with accumulation by dispossession.
Wealth through theft also engages a second contradiction of capitalism, between centralization and decentralization (Harvey 2014: 131-145) . Capital must constantly circulate, passing through the hands of workers, distributors, consumers, and owners if it is to grow, in a process called “expanded reproduction.” On the other hand, capital must also be concentrated if capitalists are to reinvest, coordinate the creation of value on ever-larger scales, and drive their competitors out of business. Decentralized competition versus centralized monopoly finds its corollary in the first contradiction, as competition happens in a context of expanded reproduction (smaller businesses struggle to produce commodities more cheaply and sell more dear, as none of them are large enough to muscle each other out of business or engage in more outright forms of theft) and monopoly allows the corruption of government needed to violate the rule of law and engage in accumulation by dispossession. Simply put, monopolies profiting by theft need the state’s monopoly of violence, but if they are too successful and monopolize too much capital circulation breaks down. The role of government is typically to manage this contradiction, to cater to the powerful without letting them get “too big to fail.” This allows decentralized competitive production and centralized monopoly theft to coexist in a dialectical relationship. Yet I would argue that the current global recession has pushed the contradiction towards monopoly. Neoliberal capitalists have been overwhelmingly successful in pushing down wages, cutting back employment, reinvesting their profit to create transnational production networks, and using these economies of scale to push their few competitors out of business and exert control over governments (Robinson 2004). The result is a great deal of production with fewer people earning enough to purchase it. This is a classic overproduction and underconsumption crisis, or the contradiction between production and realization (Harvey 2014: 79-85). Unable to realize enough profits through the sale of goods and unable to extend more credit to individual consumers and governments that are already dangerously overburdened by their existing debts, capitalists increasingly stop attempting to profit through sales and turn to accumulation by dispossession.
Finally, this turn to dispossession is propelled by the cancerous economy that must either expand or die. Harvey explains that, to avoid the recessions that shutter business and throw millions onto the streets, the capitalist economy must expand by a minimum of two to three per cent per year, each and every year (2014: 222-245). This is compound growth: adding a fixed percentage to an ever-increasing base quantity. Compound growth has brought total global economic output from USD 0.7 trillion in 1820 to $2.7 trillion in 1913, 16 trillion in 1973, 41 trillion in 2003, and 45 trillion in 2012 (Harvey 2014: 229). Notice how the marginal growth between 2003 and 2012 is more than the size of the entire world economy in 1913, when the robber barons were at their wealthiest. Moving forward, the amount of absolute growth needed to sustain capitalism’s requisite 3% is astronomical, pushing world economic output to a staggering $96 trillion by 2030. This contradiction pits an economy that must endlessly grow by privatizing, exploiting, and selling natural resources against all of us who call this finite planet home, but who will also find ourselves homeless and starving if capitalism fails. Given the overproduction and underconsumption crisis, dispossession/war is increasingly the way capitalists seek their 3%. Their most effective methods are devaluation (especially by blowing things up so new production of both bombs and buildings are needed), further privatization (especially of the land and resources where everything was blown up), and creating fictitious capital through debt (Harvey 2006: 264-329). Moreover, just as Italian autonomists such as Tronti (1966) and feminists such as Fortunati (1995) and Federici (2012) observed that expanded reproduction creates maximum value by reaching beyond the factory walls and re-orienting society so that the way we design our cities, educate our children, and delegate tasks within a marriage all contribute to value production – making society into a factory – accumulation by dispossession works best when society becomes war.
As we will see with the war on drugs, this economy is truly a Hydra that feeds off death and destruction. We must oppose individual iterations of war capitalism, such as war in Syria, the seizure of indigenous land for pipelines, and mass eviction through foreclosure, yet the army, extractive industry, and deregulated real estate are merely individual heads of the Hydra. Their mother head is private property of the common wealth, and this is our ultimate enemy, the most fundamental war-making function of capitalism. What is to be done to oppose it? The mythical Hydra is a way to begin to understand capitalism’s violent contradictions, but we need a more explicit strategy to follow. To get there, I will first focus in on how a society and political economy of war are manifest in Mexico through the war on drugs and then explore the Zapatistas’ strategy of opposing war by building autonomy.
Political economy of war in Mexico
Capitalism is a social relationship between those who labour to get the wages they need to survive and those who exploit them for profit. It is a relationship between two classes that has its material, economic, political, and cultural manifestations. So if capitalism is war, what are its social relations? We are more used to thinking of war in the way Clausewitz put it, “as politics by other means,” or in the way Foucault inverted the formulation, “politics as war by other means” (Foucault 1976: 90-92). Both point to the way international and intra-national relations of force are institutionalized as government. But how are relations of force made into social relations generally? How do they come to permeate a) society’s class structure, b) spatial structure, and c) social fabric? Through a survey of Mexico’s war on drugs and 1) its effects on the post-revolutionary class compromise, 2) the clearing and re-ordering of territory, and 3) its facilitation of hyperexploitation, I will explore these three aspects of war as a social relation, arguing that continuously losing the war on drugs successfully spreads capitalism as war.
First, let’s look at class structure. After poor and indigenous Mexicans rose up against intensifying accumulation by dispossession by seizing property on a massive scale, otherwise known as the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, the Institutional Revolutionary Party was able to restore capitalism by the middle of the twentieth century. As mentioned earlier this brand of expanded reproduction was based on a class compromise brokered by the PRI party-state (Garrido 1982). Party leaders sat atop the social pyramid, subsidizing industrialization and ensuring its stability and profitability by reigning in capitalists and doling out carrots and sticks to the labour unions. In the countryside, land reform pacified the peasants and ensured their support of the PRI. Agricultural subsidies also limited unrest, but were restricted enough to ensure a steady reserve army of labour in the industrial centres. Luis Astorga (2002) writes that the drug economy was also integrated into the PRI-managed class pyramid, under the direct control of party leaders. However, as the US government began pressuring Mexican authorities to fight a war on drugs in the 1980s, their ability to manage this system of alliances was strained. Turning back to the broader class structure, Mexico’s debt crisis and turn to vicious neoliberal structural adjustment was also destroying the compromise between the state, business, unions, and peasants the PRI had managed through a clientelistic system of carrots and sticks for so long. The final nail in the coffin was the amendment of Article 27 of the Constitution, which was the primary victory of the Mexican Revolution, and had allowed the largest land reform ever carried out in the Western Hemisphere. Gutting Article 27 in 1992 allowed Mexico to enter into the North American Free Trade Agreement, and it ended state-sanctioned land reform once a for all. The era of class compromise was over.
While the most violent consequences of this transition can be seen in the war on drugs, this is part and parcel of the state’s transition from arbiter of expanded reproduction to the state as a means of accumulation by dispossession. In the NAFTA period, and especially after 2000 when the PRI was dislodged from the presidency for the first time in 71 years, the longstanding pyramidal set of alliances structuring the drug business was upset (Astorga 2002: 22). Drug cartels became independent of PRI-dominated political structures and their unified, monopolized structures were shattered into factions that began fighting against each other for power. For example, whereas the drug trade in Guerrero had been run by the Sinaloa Cartel, which was able to keep out the Gulf Cartel, by the mid-2000s the Gulf Cartel’s armed wing, the Zetas, had broken off and gone to war with their former bosses. In Guerrero the Sinaloa Cartel had splintered into groups such as Guerreros Unidos (who participated in disappearing the 43 students), the Rojos, the Granados, the Ardillos, and many smaller groups (Grecko 2016: 65-66). While the pyramid continued to shatter, politicians ceased to manage from its peak and were instead mixed up in its disputes. Grecko documents how army soldiers in Guerrero were caught executing local elected politicians on the payroll of a rival cartel (2016: 26-27), and at the federal level, Gibler cites a National Public Radio report that the Sinaloa Cartel’s members comprised just 12% of arrests during the first four years of President Felipe Calderón’s war on drugs, whereas they were responsible for 84% of drug-related murders (2011: 28). The federal police had long been a recruiting centre for mid-level trafficking operators, and the army and local police supplied on-the-ground enforcers (Gibler 2011: 25), but as time went on the streamlined chain of command that funnelled profits to politicians and minimized violence ceased to exist. The Zetas, members of an elite unit of the Mexican army who had received training at Fort Bragg in the US, are also emblematic of the complex fusion of narco, military, political, and business structures (Paley 2014: 17). This parallels the broader neoliberal trend of the corporate form, be it armed or unarmed, becoming the dominant way power is organized.
This volatile situation was further exacerbated in 2006, shortly after Felipe Calderón became president in a fraudulent election and began a full-scale, militarized war on drugs to shore up his weak hold on power. In the eleven years since, over one hundred thousand people have died, more than thirty thousand are disappeared, and more than two million have been displaced. It had the second-most conflict deaths of any country in the world in 2016 (IISS 2017). While the mainstream analysis is that this violence is the result of Calderon beginning a war on drugs his military and police were not prepared for, the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students shows that law enforcement and government have merged with illicit business, becoming one and the same. Instead of a single, politically managed class pyramid, there are now warring businesses, each with their own corporate pyramid including politicians, police, and licit and illicit business people. Again, the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students best exemplifies this trend. Other stories in the Jornada newspaper show the extent: drug cartels have three times more employees than Pemex, the world’s largest oil producer (March 31, 2016), and they steal more than a billion US dollars of oil per year and sell it on the black market (September 25, 2014). Canadian mining companies coordinate with the cartels, who also directly export minerals themselves (May 9, 2017). This money is invested in the world’s largest banks such as HSBC, which was found to have received at least seven billion dollars over two years (December 12, 2012). Gibler estimates that USD 25 billion in narco profits are invested in US banks each year (2011: 30). This all points to the fact that illicit business is not just limited to expanded reproduction (the cultivation, processing, distribution, and sale of narcotics commodities) but also extractive industries such as mining and petroleum engaging in accumulation by dispossession. Instead of the state managing relations between social classes as to achieve both profitability and stability, the state has become a tool for dispossession utilized by capitalists for whom the division between legal and illegal business is not a concern.
Second, simple moral corruption does not explain this level of coordinated violence and profiteering. Instead, as we will see with its spatial and social impacts, losing the war on drugs is good for business. This is the extensively-researched conclusion of Dawn Paley in her book Drug War Capitalism (2014), which echoes many of the arguments made by Subcomandante Galeano (2015) / Marcos (2011). Spatially, an endless war on drugs allows elites to brutally clear territory so they may extract its resources or re-order it to facilitate the circulation of capital (Marcos 2011). This is accomplished through terror, either carried out directly by state actors, as with the Ayotzinapa students, or by “paramilitary” cartel groups that have displaced millions in Mexico. The mutilation and public display of cadavers is not just an act of revenge, but a message to residents that their town is no longer safe (Paley 2014: 18). It is now ruled by impunity. Parametria (2010) estimates there were already 1.5 million Mexicans internally displaced in 2010. Alternately, cartels also clear residents through the extortion of small businesses, and even churches (Paley 2014: 34). Or the government can devalue and clear urban territory by beginning street construction projects, contracted out to the same families that control government, that languish for years and force small and medium businesses to close due to lack of circulation. Large corporations purchase the devalued retail space, which is then rendered very profitable once the construction project is finished (Galeano 2015: 304-310). Be it through malign neglect, extortion, or violent displacement, clearing territory is profitable in itself through the sale construction materials, arms, or rents. Reconstruction is also profitable, as it allows elites to structure space in favour of capital circulation. Cleared territory can be used for drug cultivation and the extraction of minerals, lumber, water, petroleum, and wind energy, or it can be the site of new highways, airports, seaports, and pipelines to bring the fruits of dispossession to market. The war on drugs allows the undermining of civil liberties and militarization necessary for the army to act as private security for these infrastructure and foreign direct investment projects (Paley 2014: 34). Thus, by destroying old value and providing profitable investments for new value, spatial reorganization is a solution to the overproduction/underconsumption crisis (Harvey 2014: 146-163). The website Grieta: Medio para armar (grieta.org.mx) maintains a exhaustive documentation of how this is manifest via extractive and infrastructure projects across Mexico, especially regarding the resistance of indigenous communities to them. I will return to indigenous resistance when discussing autonomy as a strategic alternative to capitalism-as-war, but for now we should note that humans are the main obstacle to the clearance and re-ordering of territory. Unwanted as potential workers, residents are merely seen as “excess population,” an impediment to the extraction of resources and circulation of capital, and are thereby dispossessed by monopoly capital through a mix of state violence, predatory legal maneuvers, and mercenary cartel violence. Fighting and continuously losing the war on drugs ensures ready access to all these mechanisms.
Third, losing the war on drugs does not only allow the clearance of territory, but also the destruction of the social fabric so that hyperexploitation is possible at the workplace. This shows that capitalism as war does not only mean accumulation by dispossession, but also expanded reproduction that uses terror to hyperexploit workers. This practice has been a constant during the entire history of capitalism, and its contemporary practice has been called “maquiladorization” (Hellman 1994). To make the common wealth into private property, capitalists had to carry out the Great Transformation, uprooting rural communities, destroying a social fabric of mutual aid, and thereby violently forging a working class with no choice but to submit to the living hell of life in a Victorian industrial city. Contemporary dispossession and war continue allowing hyperexploitation, with Ciudad Juarez as an exemplary case. While many have speculated serial killers are responsible for the murders (Newton 2006: 43-48), the reality is that Juarez is a city of economic refugees fleeing the effects of neoliberal structural adjustment and searching for the only work available, in the city’s sweatshops (Mexico Solidarity Network 2004). Their hyperexploitation at work is made possible by the capitalist dispossession that has pushed them into sweatshops, plus the most extreme forms of sexual violence, causing terror that impedes political organizing. Just like the drug war’s most shocking acts, femicides are the result of a system of profound, multifaceted structural violence. As capitalism-as-war has spread through Mexico, femicides have also ceased to be limited to Ciudad Juarez and are now a national emergency, with the total number of femicides reaching an estimated forty thousand (Jornada, April 29, 2017). With it hyperexploitation is also on the rise, as 377,000 Mexicans as estimated to be living in slavery (Jornada, June 1, 2016). Similarly to an immigration regime that forces migrants to cross into the US in the most dangerous conditions, ensuring their fear of deportation will force them to accept extreme exploitation at work (No More Deaths 2011), the war on drugs and femicide also keep women too terrorized to demand justice.
It is not a conspiracy that has allowed capitalism-as-war to reshape the class structure, territory, and social fabric of Mexico. Instead, the war on drugs is a “Pyrrhic loss” (Reiman 2004) that has coordinated the actions of the government, military, foreign governments, legal capitalism, illegal capitalism, and its millions of employees. Whereas a Pyrrhic victory is one whose costs are so great as to effectively make it a defeat, a Pyrrhic loss is a defeat whose benefits are great enough to make it a success. As such, powerful actors win the war on drugs by continuing to lose it for decades: presidents can concentrate power; the US government can sell arms and train the Mexican army; social services can be cut in favour of police and military expense; civil rights can be reduced to fast-track assumed criminals into prison; police and military abuses can be legitimated by the war, or said to have been done by the cartels, or directly “subcontracted out” to them; and as long as the war is being lost the profits and bribes continue to flow. Paley concludes her book by arguing that the drug war expands capitalism by bankrupting small business, terrorizing migrants into accepting exploitation, paramilitarizing security services for extractive industry, and facilitating the concentration of real estate (2014: 139-168). Gibler ends his reporting with a simple question: “What if illegal drug businesses are not a threat to the state and capitalism, but a covert and powerful lifeline?” (2011: 204). My response is that this is most certainly the case, both in Mexico and north of its border, and we should be bold enough to say it. In terms of our three areas of interest, losing the war allows the state to fuse with licit and illicit business and dispense with the old class compromise. It allows for the easy clearance of population, facilitating extractive and infrastructure projects. Finally, it forces people to accept poverty wages and grinding precarity. All of this is beneficial to capitalists who would prefer to profit from outright theft than from expanded reproduction. All of this facilitates capitalism as war.
Yet Mexican elites are not the only ones who want these benefits, nor is this the only country where the war on drugs has been used to pursue it. North of Mexico’s border, Canadian and US elites have also sought to abandon the post-war class compromise, expand extractive industry, and institute precarity, and the war on drugs has been a helpful tool here too. Arguments to this effect primarily focus on the US, from which between one third and seventy percent of global arms transfers originate (depending on the year) (Hartung 2016). Furthermore, the war on drugs in the US was used to increase the prison population by 1,100% between 1980 and 2005 (Gibler 2011: 44). The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits slavery, with the exception of prisoners, meaning the prison system is a larger source of slave labour than all the Southern plantations combined before the Civil War (Childs 2015). As stated earlier, the contradictions propelling these developments are global, with similar effects across capitalism’s uneven geography. We can look to Mexico to better understand these global dynamics, and we can also look there to better understand possible alternatives. Indeed, indigenous peoples have been resisting capitalism-as-war for five hundred years and have much to teach the rest of us.
Conclusion: Autonomy as freedom
In their discussions with the National Indigenous Congress, the Zapatistas have concluded that the war of extermination indigenous peoples are facing across Mexico is capitalism returning to its original state (Galeano 2015: 289-290). As important as it is to grasp the full extent of capitalism as war and the mechanisms by which this has come to be, this line of thinking puts us dangerously at risk of falling into nihilism. This would be an enormous mistake, for if we see the descent into violence as inevitable, our only strategic options are to make sure the violence benefits “my group” or to advocate for hiding the violence on the margins. Instead, capitalism has become outright war because capitalism is in crisis, and it is the resistance of the oppressed that has created this crisis. The powerful would much rather we passively submit to exploitation, no enforcement needed. Yet this will never be the case: capitalism’s greatest contradiction is class struggle (Galeano 2015: 313, Harvey 2014: 264-281). We, the great majority of humanity, only create wealth for the few against our will. The wealthy few must constantly invent new forms of accumulation, some more subtle, but often more violent. Against this, we too must find new forms of resistance, or we must spread forms that have until now been under-appreciated. We would therefore be wise to look to indigenous autonomy, to the successful resistance of peoples who have survived centuries of attempted genocide and forced integration into the social relation that is capitalism, as we search for strategic, practical alternatives. Zapatista autonomy is one of the most successful examples of a people faced with war and dispossession recuperating their common wealth. While they refuse to be made into a model to be followed, they are adamant in urging the rest of the left – both indigenous and settler – to organize for autonomy as well (Moisés 2015).
Instead of a simple rejection of the state, political parties, or trade unions, autonomy can best be understood in relation to society as a factory. Expanded reproduction seeks to make every person into a worker, be it in the factory, at the office, in the home, or in training at school. The Italian autonomists who elaborated this theory concluded that people could liberate themselves through a strategy of refusal. The society-as-factory should go on strike, not to win better working conditions, but to take over the factory and thereby end alienated work altogether. As we have seen, capitalists responded to this insurgency with neoliberalism, a political-economic strategy whose priority is to defeat worker agitation by implementing precarity (Graeber 2012) and which prioritizes accumulation by dispossession. Instead of ushering in the reign of democracy and freedom (Friedman 2002), neoliberalism has perpetuated an economy of war, which is exemplified by the war on drugs. Autonomy can best be understood as lending a different direction to the strategy against society-as-factory. Instead of going on strike, autonomy seeks to reorganize society so that we may produce outside of capitalism and enjoy the fruits of our collective labour.
The Zapatistas have done just that, and their autonomy begins with land. In addition to briefly occupying major towns on January 1, 1994 the Zapatistas permanently recuperated hundreds of plantations, measuring an estimated 531 square miles in total (Nunez Rodriguez 2013: 45). On many of these haciendas, the conditions prior to 1994 can only be described as slavery, and the January 1st uprising is one of the single greatest acts of indigenous decolonization and land redistribution since the Mexican Revolution. This collectively-held land is the material basis upon which cooperatives, self-government, education, health, and justice are built. Without it the Zapatistas could not free themselves from a government and justice system that is synonymous with money to create systems that are synonymous with collective work (Fernandez 2014: 297-390).
Autonomy is the practice of living together on this recuperated, collectively-held land. Institutionally, it is an indigenous self-government the Zapatistas have created on the village, municipal, and regional level. However, saying this is an “institution” of self-government obfuscates what is in practice a cycle of community consultation, proposal, agreement, implementation, report-back, and modification that is repeated continuously, in every one of the hundreds of Zapatista communities, and at all levels of self-government (which the Zapatistas contrast with Mexico’s “bad government” by calling theirs “good government”). In this sense, autonomous government is the facilitation and implementation of community agreements (EZLN 2013). Authorities chosen through assemblies at the village, municipal, and regional levels administer the autonomous projects that allow people to live together on their collectively-held land. These projects include a system of primary and secondary education, taught in both Mayan languages and Spanish by Zapatista education promoters using a curriculum set by the community; a system of clinics and hospitals that, in addition to general and preventative medicine, includes dentistry, pre-natal care, midwifery, herbal medicine, bone-setting, and surgery; a number of cooperative banks that give loans at 2% interest, including banks dedicated to starting women’s cooperative projects, banks for agricultural projects, banks for medical expenses, and banks for veterans and widows; radio stations transmitting music, news, and political education; and a plethora of cooperatives dedicated to pursuits such as livestock, manure production, general stores, coffee production and distribution, transport of goods, passenger vans, warehousing, baking, butchers, poultry, pork, rice, ironworks, beans, corn, tortillas, and boot-making.
All said, their autonomy is unheard of in both its scope and duration. Although the Zapatistas have not published an overall accounting of their total membership, it is surely larger and more longstanding than the Paris Commune of 1871 or the Oaxaca Commune of 2006 (Roman and Velasco 2008). In the Oventic caracol, which is only one of five regions, there are 52 health clinics, 158 schools, 8 agroecology centres, and 3 radio stations. The schools have 510 teachers and coordinators with 4886 students, there are 284 agroecology promoters, and the radio stations have 62 DJs and coordinators. The total number of authorities across the municipal governments of the region is 268. Again, this only represents one-fifth of Zapatista territory, and all these positions are unwaged. Furthermore, it has been built in a context of both overt paramilitary attacks and a government-sponsored counter-insurgency strategy that seeks to coopt Zapatista support bases by offering them welfare.
Again, Zapatista autonomy is not a recipe to be replicated. Theirs has deep roots in Mayan territory and culture, and groups elsewhere must develop the means of production, forms of self-government, and political culture corresponding to their particular location and dynamics. Nonetheless, the underlying spirit of autonomy is clear. There can be no negotiation with those who control capitalism-as-war, for a war that is a little less violent or a little less overt (Galeano 2017). Autonomy does not seek a new class compromise that requests violence be of the legalized variety. It seeks freedom. This “freedom according to the Zapatistas” (EZLN 2013) is the freedom to eat, be housed, work the land, learn, be informed, to live in peace. It is the freedom to achieve this collectively, and without the mediation of a class that will only extend these freedoms if there is a profit in it. It is the freedom to do the labour we collectively deem most necessary, to do it in the way we choose, and for the benefit of our community or others we are in solidarity with. It is the freedom to produce and enjoy the common wealth. In all these ways, autonomy is the antithesis of capitalism-as-war. Autonomy is based on collective ownership and collective work, thereby slaying the Hydra by ending private property. Instead of a class compromise between labouring and accumulating classes, it is the self-government of the workers. Instead of dispossession and displacement, it is the creation of a mutually-supportive social fabric. Instead of hyperexploitation, it is the creation of freedom flowing from collective work producing material resources. As the capitalist Hydra continues to pursue death and destruction as its preferred means of accumulation, autonomy is the way we will foster life.
End notes
1: This summary was compiled using Témoris Grecko’s carefully-researched book Ayotzinapa, Mentira Histórica (2016).
2: This section brings together various points made by Subcomandante Galeano in his essays “El Método, la bibliografía y un Drone en las profundidades de las montanas del Sureste Mexicano” (2015: 210-230) and “La genealogía del crimen” (2015: 278-301).
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Stuart Schussler 