Presented on June 1, 2017 at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Studies in Co-Operation, “New Cooperativism” Stream
Abstract
Debates on the left, especially debates on autonomy, all too often resemble a theoretical boxing match between opposing positions. Lost in the melee is a strategic focus on what is to be done to achieve freedom. I argue that we should lend strategic focus to Tronti and Hardt and Negri’s theories of autonomy by looking to the Zapatistas. I describe the under-appreciated success of this indigenous organization in building a practical autonomy, which I theorize as an anticapitalist social relation manifest through politicizing ideology, self-government, and material cooperative projects. I relate these observations to Italian concepts of autonomous self-valorization and conclude by asking how North American student-activists can apply the strategic lessons found in Zapatismo.
Introduction
The long road of struggles for liberation is replete with caution signs and mistakes to avoid. Unions must end up delivering a disciplined labour force in return for better contracts. Vanguards are the cradle of new elites. Taking up arms leads to authoritarianism and spiralling violence. Revolution-by-election ends up being far too similar to the old system. Newer caution signs point to the limits of protest (White 2016), signaling that the largest concurrent marches in world history failed to stop the Iraq War and thousands of occupations failed to reign in Wall Street. So what is to be done? We are well aware of what to avoid, but what are strategies for success?
We on the academic left are readily willing to critique our colleagues’ analyses, putting ever more caution signs, yet strategy is sorely lacking. Switching metaphors, the left often resembles a boxing ring, where theorists defend their positions by punching through those of their opponents. The slug match over what to do with about the state is longstanding, with socialists advocating for putting the public interest above private profit by using the state to expand regulation and social services; and autonomists rejecting both the private sphere of capitalism and the public sphere of socialism, instead promoting the commons (Hardt and Negri 2009). Yet this is by no means the only boxing ring. Those deemed “autonomists” are a heterogeneous group, including liberals such as John Rawls who follow Kant in asserting autonomy is the reasoning individual’s self-generation of moral principles (1971: 561). Marxist autonomists such as Tronti (1966) spar against liberal individualism, observing that labour is the only commodity capable of giving value to other commodities. This leads Italian autonomists to theorize autonomy in terms of workers’ self-valorization instead of individual reason. Feminist autonomists extend self-valorization even further, asserting that gendered domestic work comprises the reproductive labour necessary for anyone to mature to an “employable” level and show up to work day after day (Fortunati 1995, Federici 2012). As such, women should recognize their foundational position and dedicate their efforts to autonomy instead of unwaged reproduction of the social factory. Yet the most gruesome fights are over the question of the state and degrees of independence from it. State-sanctioned, legally autonomous zones exist in Nicaragua (Gonzalez 2008), but Luis Villoro (1998) prioritizes questions of culture and self-determination in his theory of autonomy, saying that autonomy demands a shared sense of belonging, a shared project, and a shared territory. Against Villoro’s conception of autonomy as self-determination, anarchists assert a greater antagonism to the state. They advocate for a prefigurative strategy wherein groups build a new world in the shell of the old (Mondonesi 2011, Holloway 2002). Their opponents say the practices anarchists call “prefiguration” actually mean navel-gazing, romanticism (Albertani 2011), and a dependence on spontaneity that betrays an underlying lack of strategy (Thwaites 2011).
With so many concurrent scuffles, we are faced with a battle royale. Yet in critiquing the boxing match, I do not mean to say, “we should all just get along.” We need debate to improve our theory. My own position is most similar to that of the Italian autonomists, but it is also modified in key aspects by Zapatismo. In this article I will assert that autonomy is the cooperative production of value for the direct use of those who produce it, plus self-government that administers this process without separating itself from the social fabric. Since autonomy defined in this way could just as easily be oppressive as liberatory, leftist autonomist practice must be rooted in politicization. These boxing matches make for entertaining reading as theorists defend their favourite concepts against the blows of their competitors, yet the repartee remains inside the ring of theory, isolated from the world of practice. It is here, in the world of everyday organizing where we will hash out practical goals, obstacles, and the strategic question of what is to be done. Beginning with the belief that good theory should promote good practice, I argue that we should look to successful examples of autonomy, see what aspects of these practices are generalizable, and apply it to struggles in other places. I will do this by first looking to primary source documents describing the structure and achievements of Zapatista autonomy, an indigenous commune established in Chiapas, Mexico in 1983 that thrives today. Second, I will theorize Zapatista autonomy as a politicized ideology, as a set of anticapitalist social relations allowing self-government, and as material, cooperative projects I will then relate this Zapatista-informed conception of autonomy to the Italian autonomist tradition. I will end by asking what these theoretical indications mean for the day-to-day practice of a different, more heterogeneous, and less established group: North American student-activists who have visited Chiapas and are attempting to build autonomy in their home communities. Throughout, I will emphasize that, just as capitalism is a social relation between those who produce wealth and those who control it that structures all of society, autonomy is an alternative social relation where the common wealth is shared collectively. Yet this is easier said than done, so we should look for successful examples and constructive obstacles so we may walk the walk and not just talk the talk.
Zapatista autonomy (1)
While many on the left are familiar with the Zapatista uprising in 1994, few know about their incredible success in building an autonomy that has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Mexicans. The standard summary is that the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN in Spanish) rose up on the day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect, occupied major cities in the state of Chiapas long enough to read their First Declaration and trash the government’s land records, and after retreating from the cities the full force of the Mexican military brutally attacked indigenous communities at large until civil society succeeded in demanding a cease-fire on January 12, 1994. After this sensational debut, most leftists only know that the Zapatistas signed the San Andrés Accords on indigenous autonomy with the Mexican government in 1996, that 47 members of the sympathetic indigenous group Las Abejas were massacred in Acteal, Chiapas in 1997, that the government only integrated the accords into its constitution in 2001 after intense popular pressure and a Zapatista march on Mexico City, but that this achievement was in fact a treason, as the government had whittled down the text so much as to make it a step backwards for indigenous autonomy. This caused the Zapatistas to reject all the major political parties, since all had supported the disingenuous constitutional reform. During the next presidential campaign in 2006 Subcomandante Marcos railed against center-left candidate López Obrador, causing a break with the socialist left who blame the Zapatistas for Obrador’s defeat. Thus, the popular account only includes what was widely reported, namely when indigenous people were fighting, dying, negotiating, marching or engaging presidential politics. It misses most of what the Zapatistas have done over their 33-year history, going from a clandestine guerrilla army to a civil self-government that includes hundreds of thousands of support bases, hundreds of schools and clinics, and scores of cooperatives. It misses their transition from issuing thirteen demands (2) to the government during the uprising, to negotiating these demands within a framework of indigenous autonomy at San Andrés, to unilaterally implementing the demands after the government’s treason. This autonomy is their greatest success and also their least appreciated one.
Zapatista autonomy begins with land, with the material space of production and reproduction. 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 community 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).
Autonomy is the practice of living together on this recuperated, collectively-held land. It is the slow process of building anticapitalist social relations in this liberated space. Institutionally, autonomy is the 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 consultation through community assemblies, proposal, agreement, implementation, rendering of accounts, 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 2013a). The Zapatista mantra is that good government must “lead by obeying.” As Paulina Fernandez shows through her extensive transcripts of interviews with Zapatista support bases (2014: 105-205), the authorities who do the facilitating and implementing are elected to cargos (literally, a load or burden) in a manner totally contrary to conventional politics. Candidates do not campaign and are instead nominated by peers at community assemblies based on neighbours’ consideration of the candidate’s moral authority and adherence to the seven principles of Zapatista good government. (3) Each community, municipality, and zone has its own nominating process, based on their historic practice and geographical conditions. At the local level, positions include the Agent, whose focus is conflict resolution, a Commissioner who attends to land and agricultural issues, and local coordinators for education, health, and cooperative projects. In each municipality there is a governing Council, an Agrarian Commission, and an Honour and Justice Commission, as well as coordinating teams for health, education, and cooperatives. On the most general level of the five Zapatista zones, each has a Good Government Junta with 24 to 36 members. There is gender parity amongst authorities, who always work as a team with their co-representative, treasurer, and secretary instead of each individual having a specific position. Literacy and fluency in Spanish is not required, but abstention from alcohol is. Once chosen, there is a ceremony where a mutual promise is made: authorities vow to respect the will of the community, and community members vow to participate in the collective work the authority administers. This is followed by a party where outgoing authorities are celebrated and the new ones are welcomed. Once on the job, authorities receive no payment for their service, though their fellow community members aid them with their agricultural and domestic responsibilities and money from cooperative projects pays for their transportation. There is no re-election after the three-year term, and because the work is unpaid few wish it were otherwise. If the assembly disapproves of an authority’s work or book-keeping, they may be immediately recalled. This practice of self-government, whose details are constantly modified as problems and changes arise, is how the broad concept of “anticapitalist social relations” is manifest in practice.
The primary role of good government authorities is to administer the day-to-day work of 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. The project began with the formation of the EZLN in 1983 and has grown by leaps and bounds since they definitively broke with all political parties in 2001 and formed the Good Government Juntas in 2003. Because the incremental flowering of their autonomy lacks in shock value, it is vastly under-reported even in alternative media and thereby under-appreciated on the left. 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. The numbers are astounding, and they speak to an autonomy founded on 1) a politicization of the entire community, 2) ensuring self-government remains the accountable administration of a collective power that is never removed from this community level, and 3) resulting in an array of cooperative projects that are the material sustenance of autonomy. In the next section I will discuss these three aspects of Zapatista autonomy, looking for generalizable aspects that can both enrich our theoretical understanding of autonomy and led strategic guidance to North American student-activists looking to build autonomy in their own spaces.
Autonomy as an anticapitalist social relation
Whereas caricatures of autonomy tend to focus on either its negativity – autonomy as separation and independence from the state, political parties, unions, industrial production, or “going off the grid” entirely – or vague notions of power-to, self-valorization, and the commons, Zapatista autonomy is refreshingly tangible. From its daily practice in Chiapas, we can see autonomy is above all a social relation: a way of relating, deciding, and working together that makes power inseparable from the community. This is in contrast to capitalist social relations, where power is stolen from the many and used as a tool against us at every turn. Zapatista autonomy has been amazingly successful in Chiapas, yet there are no autonomous projects in North America that have had similar level of success. What can “freedom according to the Zapatistas” teach the rest of us who dream of liberation? If autonomy is an anticapitalist social relation, what strategies will aid collectives in building it? To better approach these questions, I will explore various aspects of its social relation, first as a politicizing ideology, second as it is formalized into self-government, and third as it is materialized in productive and reproductive projects.
At the emotional level, Zapatista autonomy is the practice of dignity (Klein 2015: 172). It is a dignity which takes pride in the people being the authors of their own history, in being an emancipated, empowered collectivity. Those who critique autonomy frequently allege its practitioners lack political clarity (Harvey 2015), observing that libertarians and fundamentalists also reject the state, parties, and unions, probably finding dignity in this stance too. So it is important to see that successful examples of anticapitalist autonomy have a clearly defined political ideology rooting them in decolonial and anti-oppressive politics. For Zapatismo, this means power from below (popular) and to the left (anticapitalist) (EZLN 2005); it is power-with and power-to, not power-over (Holloway 2002). Its politicizing beliefs have transformed over time and are not the same as when six members of the Forces of National Liberation arrived in Chiapas in 1983, fashioning themselves an enlightened revolutionary vanguard (Marcos 2003a). Instead, they ascertained they must first learn to listen and found the indigenous communities of Chiapas had been practicing autonomy since colonization first began (EZLN 2013d: 70), in opposition to the Spanish, then against the liberal Mexican government, later against the Party of the Institutional Revolution, and today against globalized neoliberalism. Fundamental mechanisms of this centuries-old autonomy are the community assembly, the delegation of authorities to serve the people (the cargo system), and inter-community referendums on key decisions (the consulta) (Klein 2015: 171-216). The extent to which this democratic, horizontal practice became common sense is the extent to which the political culture has been politicized (Gonzalez Casanova 2005: 83), meaning its spirit and practice are taken as a given and woven into everyday community life. It is the extent to which committing exploitation against one another is unthinkable (Simpson 2014: 23).
Zapatista political ideology is enshrined in refrains such as “everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves,” “questioning as we walk,” and “building a world where many worlds fit,” and it is also codified in the seven principles of good government. When reading interviews with Zapatista good government authorities, these principles are constantly referenced as they reflect on the successes and obstacles of their work. They indicate a political culture, yet the ideology is not to be confused with an orthodoxy or doctrine. While women are prohibited from being authorities in the self-government of many non-Zapatista Mayan communities, Zapatista women have spoken about the “triple oppression” of being poor, indigenous, and female (Miriam 2015: 109). They explain their project is to both demand their male counterparts to take on domestic tasks as to allow women to participate in autonomous government, while also raising a new generation of boys and girls for whom women’s exclusion from autonomy is unthinkable (EZLN 2013d: 60). As in the refrain “questioning as we walk,” political ideology is a process, a set of guidelines that are being both questioned and deployed as people work together to build freedom. Ideology is the glue that holds people together in this collective pursuit, and it is the principles with which they think through problems.
Second, for autonomy to be an anticapitalist social relation, it must be both firmly rooted in people’s common sense and formalized into an intentional and accountable structure. Principles are well and good, but there must be a way to ensure they are consistently practiced over the broad expanse of Zapatista communities. Self-government is the formalization of autonomous practice, done in a way that is careful not to remove power from the people-as-government or to create a governing structure above and against them, but instead to “disperse power” throughout society (Zibechi 2010). To understand how this is done, it is helpful to compare self-government with the representational democracy we are most familiar with under capitalism. When campaign season begins every few years, each candidate attempts to build a cult around their individual personality by convincing us they have a certain specialized knowledge that will make them an excellent authority. Most importantly, they make promise after promise that, if elected, they will magically solve all our problems. Zapatista self-government is contrary on all accounts. There are no campaigns, and those selected by their peers always govern as a team with the others chosen for local, municipal, or regional government. People are selected on the basis of their prestige in the community, and not because of any specialization. In fact, training is an important part of Zapatista self-government because all adults are expected to potentially serve as authorities, regardless of their literacy, Spanish fluency, accounting, or computer skills. Finally, self-government is seen as “leading by obeying,” meaning that authorities are not chosen so they will effortlessly solve people’s problems, but instead to administer the people’s decisions as they collectively debate and pursue solutions. As Subcomandante Moisés says, in the collective practice of self-government “problems are our textbook” for learning “freedom according to the Zapatistas” (Moisés 2015: 176-7).
Interviews with Zapatista good government authorities are replete with examples of working through problems. In fact, more than a structure of responsibilities, self-government emerges as the process of working through problems through debate and experiment, trying out solutions, finding new problems, and so forth. Indeed, the Zapatistas added an entire new, regional level of self-government (the caracoles) in part as a solution to the problems of municipal authorities in coordinating with each other and in ensuring the accountability of non-governmental organizations (Marcos 2003a, 2003b). Women’s participation (or, more specifically, men’s prevention of women’s participation) is another problem whose solution has fundamentally altered good government. Debate on how to overcome sexism has opened discussion on how to revise the 1993 Women’s Revolutionary Law and make it into a reality (EZLN 2013c: 24-31), the creation of banks for women’s cooperative projects (EZLN 2013a: 19), training in skills such as accounting, radio transmission, and land surveying (EZLN 2013c: 20-21), and more systematically integrating women into the autonomous healthcare system as herbalists, bonesetters, and midwives (EZLN 2013c: 22-23). Finally, with each Zapatista family farming their personal plot while also supporting dozens of program coordinators and good government authorities who cannot tend to their own fields, as well as doing collective work in the many cooperatives listed above, dividing up work and the fruits of this labour is a textbook of its own (EZLN 2013a: 107-108, Moisés 2015: 107-108). Working through these problems is how autonomy comes to be the practice of freedom, how people find ways of relating to each other so they can build and enjoy a common wealth.
Third, “Freedom according to the Zapatistas” is the realization of their original thirteen demands, the freedom to eat, be housed, work the land, to learn, be informed, to be at peace. As stated above, these freedoms-to are impossible without land. It is the foundation of the agricultural cooperatives that allow Zapatistas to reject ill-intentioned government aid and to feed their teachers and good government authorities. It is where their schools, clinics, and self-government offices are built. It is where their radio transmitters emit from. It is what sustains their self-defence forces, who maintain the unilateral cease-fire of January 12, 1994. It is what produces the wealth that is redistributed through their cooperative banks. Indeed, there is no community or autonomy without the collective management of resources (Zibechi 2010: 11-31), meaning so-called “communities” of individuals with similar identities or who use the same social media platform are not communities at all if there is no material substance to their collaboration. If autonomy is the freedom to produce and enjoy the common wealth, this autonomy must be tangible. It must produce value that people can feel, taste, and use. In the next section, this notion of autonomy as the common, material production of value will serve as a bridge by which Zapatismo can enrich Italian theories of autonomy.
Towards a practical theory of autonomy
The awesome success of Zapatista autonomy provides us with a set of concrete practices, the nuts and bolts of “autonomy as an anticapitalist social relation,” that can lend strategic focus to theories of autonomy. In the last section I highlighted the ideological, self-government, and material aspects of their autonomy. Continuing with the theme of cooperative material production on recuperated land, I will draw out three broad concepts: land and projects as a source of material value, self-government as the coordination of value production, and political ideology as the substance of an identity of struggle. Each of these can enrich general theories of autonomy, especially those of the Italian tradition.
One of Marxism’s foundational contradictions is that workers alone can produce value, but instead of seeing ourselves as the most powerful group under capitalism, the source of all wealth, we believe our work is only worth the meager wages the boss decides to pay. Mario Tronti (1966) touched off the Italian autonomist tradition by asserting that workers’ strategy for liberation should be to recognize and harness our production of value, to “self-valorize.” Theorists such as Leopoldina Fortunati (1995) and Silvia Federici (2012) extended this analysis by observing that, in addition to industrial workers valuing their waged production, domestic workers should value their unwaged reproduction – all the cooking, cleaning, clothing, caring, and loving needed if anyone is going to regularly show up for work in the first place. This all leads to the conclusion that working women and men, the unwaged and waged workers of the world, create all the wealth that circulates through our economy. Autonomy means keeping this value within our communities and using it to achieve freedom instead of enriching those who use their wealth to further enslave us. For the Zapatistas, autonomy began with recuperating the land, but other means of production can also be the foundation. The “right to the city” (Harvey 2012) nods at this sort of recuperation, and “the new cooperativism” (Vieta 2010) focuses our attention to the thousands of cooperatives around the world making these ideals into functioning realities.
Yet taking back the land, the factory, the city, or any other means of production is not enough to create material autonomy. It is necessary to coordinate those who will reproduce our communities and produce with these means of production. Under capitalism, a whole host of mechanisms are used to brutally coordinate the social factory that produces wealth for the few and poverty for the many. The state facilitates the dispossession of Mexican farmers’ land, ensuring a steady stream of agricultural workers in Baja California and the Central Valley. Internalized racism, sexism, and ableism, ensure workers will enforce hierarchy on each other, in the office and at home. Police beat into submission and jail those not willing to take orders. This is the continuous violence of the Great Transformation (Polanyi 2001), turning common land into private plantations, dignified humans into impoverished workers, and fraternal community into the community of money. The more the Great Transformation is achieved, the more the whole of society operates as one large factory (Tronti 1966) or one large plantation (Moisés 2017), and all our social relations, coordination, and activity revolves around the production, consumption, and reproduction of capital.
Every social relation is defined by the common it brings into existence (Hardt and Negri 2009). While capitalism’s social relation is a fractured one, autonomy – as an anticapitalist social relation – foments an integral, or “communalizing” relation (Zibechi 2010). Instead of the Great Transformation allowing money to fragment society, autonomy uses collective production to strengthen the social fabric (Esteva 2011). With every cooperative that is formed, every family under less financial and emotional pressure because of it, every debate about the finer points of collective work that is resolved, every authority who carries out what was decided in this debate (or who is called to task for not carrying it out), social relations are strengthened and removed from the marketplaces of commodities and corrupt politics. Communities learn how to share the common wealth instead of surrendering it to the boss.
This communalization is the function of problem solving in Zapatista self-government. When the Zapatistas speak about “getting organized” (Moisés 2015), they refer to the slow, concrete process of convoking people, reflecting over common problems, getting to the root of the problem (capitalism, colonialism, sexism), forming a collectivity that can respond to this problem, and taking concrete steps to do so. This may sound tedious but discussion of organizing, of the intentional creation of social relations and their mobilization for material goals, is largely absent in the Italian autonomist literature. For Tronti, workers are already organized in the factory and must merely self-valorize. For Hardt and Negri, immaterial production brings together an immanent multitude, which is already bursting forth and does not need to be summoned or organized (2004). The theorist-activists behind the Wages for Housework campaign did indeed call for organizing, yet their efforts were widely attacked by on the left (Federici 2012). Yet we would be well-advised to not only study the work of feminist Marxists, but also to follow them in thinking strategically about the step by step process of how autonomy can be built. Communalizing may sound like a great idea, but it takes a great deal of tiresome work to make it exist in the world.
Finally, beyond means of production or social coordination, autonomy must also be a state of mind, mobilized as an identity. As noted above, capitalism succeeds by convincing workers they are merely earning their wage and not creating wealth; by convincing unwaged houseworkers they are not “working” at all, and definitely not creating the necessary foundation for any and all work to be done. Our successful submission depends on this mystification, on accepting the way money fragments us, on accepting hierarchy, on allowing alienation to permeate all aspects of our psyche, labor, relations, and humanity (Ollman 1976: 131-135). When we accept all this, we easily take on capitalism’s preferred identities and play the part ascribed by them: as conservatives or liberals, as patriots, as social media branding experts, as “breadwinners,” as “illegals,” as “crazy.”
Conversely, autonomy must involve demystification. This is a theme that comes through strongly in the Italian autonomist tradition, beginning with Panzieri (Aureli 2008: 21-31), and it is also central to Paulo Freire’s methodology of “consciousness raising” (1999). Likewise, the Zapatista discourse on indigeneity can be seen as demystification, as creating and mobilizing an identity against colonialism. With the rallying cry of “Never again a Mexico without us!,” Comandanta Ramona convoked the National Indigenous Congress in 1996, which today includes 43 indigenous nations in 523 communities across Mexico (Indigenous National Congress 2017). The Congress is the manifestation and mobilization of an indigenous identity that demands survival without ceasing to be indigenous (Moisés and Galeano 2016), and Lopez Bárcenas (2011) observes that indigenous autonomy across the Americas mobilizes subjectivity in this way. Thus, Zapatismo and indigenous struggle provide concrete strategic examples that flesh out the theoretical discussion of demystification we find in the Italian autonomist tradition. However, simply pasting the strategies of indigenous identity onto other, settler-led struggles is obviously unacceptable. This is a question Zapatista-inspired student-activists attempting to build autonomy in North America will have to engage. They must build a widely-recognized, deeply-felt common sense, based on anticapitalism, decolonization, and anti-oppression. More than simple catchphrases, these principles also have deep roots in North American settler communities struggling for liberation, roots that organized collectives must tap into and nourish. As we will see, simply building community is the first step in this process.
Conclusion: Bringing autonomy home
Having exited the boxing ring of theoretical fistfights, this article has sought to look for strategic guidance on how to build autonomy, not to simply win arguments. First I considered the Zapatistas’ under-appreciated success in building a wide-ranging autonomy amongst their hundreds of thousands of members. I then pulled out some general aspects of this practice, including Zapatismo’s political ideology, self-government, and cooperative material projects. These practices enrich Italian theories of autonomy, helping us focus on strategic organization, but they have their limits. In all three categories of ideological development, self-government, and material projects, the Zapatistas are much more advanced than the fledgling autonomous collectives north of Mexico. The Mayan organization is part of a centuries-long resistance to colonization with a long tradition of indigenous autonomy. This political culture is shared amongst its members, who have formalized into three levels of good government, which involves hundreds (or even thousands) of assembly-appointed authorities working without pay. This self-government is used to administer collective work on an enormous extension of land that was recuperated from plantation elites, completely eliminating their presence in many areas. In urban areas where we collectively control no land or means of production, where we lack a broadly and deeply shared political culture of community assemblies, where managerial positions, invested wealth and “the Canadian Dream” make class status more complicated, and where “self-government” is usually limited to procedural norms at biweekly meetings among a dozen people – we are in quite different circumstances.
Once again, what is to be done? This is the question I posed to 104 interviewees, each of whom had spent four to six weeks in the Zapatista good government centre of Oventic as part of the Mexico Solidarity Network’s study abroad program, before returning to Canada or the United States to complete their university education. Having participated at some point between 2005 and 2015, many of them are either explicitly trying to build autonomy back home now, or they seek to integrate aspects of it into their daily work and political organizing. Of these 104, for two-thirds their most politically-engaged activity is also their paid work, and one-third do their most engaged organizing without pay. In terms of organizing focus (both paid and unpaid), one quarter are in collectives, affinity groups, and study circles, another quarter are primary, secondary, and higher education teachers; another quarter work for non-governmental organizations, public social services, or labour unions; and the final quarter work in a social enterprise, healthcare, media, or none of the above (Schussler 2017: 2-3).
Beyond categorizing their work, during our interviews we discussed the details of these student-activists’ activities, what their obstacles have been, and where they hope to see it all go. Many strategic priorities emerge from the interviews, which I will again group as politicization, self-government, and cooperative material projects. On the whole, the student-activists are quite politicized in support of anticapitalism, decolonization, and anti-oppression, which should come as no surprise given their choice to learn about Zapatista autonomy. Many were radicalized through life experiences associated with being women, working class, immigrants, racialized, or indigenous, and nearly all developed their theoretical understanding of radical politics while in university. However, for many this is also an individual politicization they do not share with their families or significant portions of their social circles. The strategic lesson here is that politicization is important, but it must also be a collective process that is grounded in struggle over material resources. Left isolated, politicized individuals are angry at the problems they understand on both a theoretical and practical level, but lack a group to work through these problems with and without the material resources that will provide a solution.
In discussing their everyday obstacles, I observed interviewees to be at various stages in starting or engaging a collective process. The first group considered themselves isolated, finding neither paid nor volunteer political work they felt good about. A second, much more numerous group had found paid work that provides opportunities for political intervention, such as public school teachers or at NGOs, yet this work is very circumscribed by policies and surveillance by management. They feel they are able to divert certain organizational resources towards more radical groups or engage in more radical politics “under the radar,” but by-and-large they felt they were delivering services supplied by powerful institutions to disempowered, disengaged people. If autonomy is cooperative production of value plus self-government, these interviewees may aspire to autonomy but are not currently practicing it. Finally, there is a third group who are “organizing” in the sense that their collectives and organizations are actively bringing in people directly affected by capitalism’s violence so that the group can propose and pursue collective solutions. Examples include tenants fighting exploitative landlords, union members engaging their coworkers, victims of police brutality and mass incarceration fighting for abolition, and families defending against deportations.
I would argue that, if we want to build autonomy, this sort of organizing must be the primary focus since autonomy cannot be built by isolated individuals or from within organizations beholden to unaccountable elites, including foundations, bureaucracies, and the capitalist political parties. Autonomy is a radical, popular departure from capitalist social relations, and only sustained, intentional organizing can achieve this, even if autonomy begins on a small scale. Collectivity must be organized, and it must also be material. This is the most pressing strategic necessity that emerges from my interviews. Most interviewees are attempting to politicize education, to demand the laws be applied to support the poor, to expand public social services, to increase media coverage of social movements, or to oppose violence by the state and corporations. All these activities are desperately needed and certainly improve people’s lives. However, the Zapatista experience clearly shows that, to radically change people’s lives so they begin to collectively control their own destiny, to truly practice freedom, they had to take back the land and collectively work it. Without land and cooperatives, they would not be able to unilaterally satisfy their original thirteen demands. Does this mean others can only build autonomy once they have similarly recuperated land? This is a priority of indigenous movements across Turtle Island and Abya Yala, but it poses a host of questions for anticapitalist settlers who refuse to “occupy” already-stolen land (Barker 2012). North American cities are a particular type of indigenous land, which concentrate more- and less-recently-arrived waves of settlers and also concentrate the capital that is the basis of colonial power. All this is to say that anticapitalist, decolonial strategy in a place like Toronto is much different from Chiapas. Returning to my interviews, those who were more skeptical about their possibilities for building autonomy were dedicating their energy to legal reform, raising awareness, administering services, or impeding state violence. Those who were most excited had found material projects for building autonomy, such as impeding evictions and thereby asserting a degree of community control over housing, building successful workers’ cooperatives, and forming unions ready and willing to assert collective power against the boss.
While the day-to-day trials of building anticapitalist social relations can be quite draining, these interviewees were excited to be building community in ways it had not existed before. This is the everyday work of autonomy. As we have seen in the waning attention to the Zapatistas after the 1990s, this work does not grab headlines, but it does build freedom. To be more free, we should learn from those who have had some success, but most importantly we must collectively stumble upon our own problems and work out our own answers.
End notes
1: My description of Zapatista autonomy summarizes two primary sources. The first is a set of four textbooks assembled by the Zapatistas (EZLN 2013 a,b,c,d) for participants in their Escuelita, or “little school.” Around 4,500 students (including myself) spent a week living with a Zapatista family, discussing the textbooks, and learning about their autonomous projects (or “freedom according to the Zapatistas”) by participating in collective work. The second is a book by Paulina Fernandez (2014), the great majority of which is direct transcriptions of her interviews with Zapatistas on autonomous government and justice.
2: The thirteen demands are for land, work, food, housing, health, education, independence, democracy, freedom, information, culture, justice, and peace (EZLN 1994).
3: The seven principles are obey, don’t command; represent, don’t supplant; go deeper, not higher; serve, don’t serve yourself; convince, don’t conquer; build, don’t destroy; and propose, don’t impose (EZLN 2013d: 73-74).
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Stuart Schussler 