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.

Continue reading “The Zapatistas and the Capitalist Hydra: Theorizing and Responding to Mexico’s Crisis”

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.

Continue reading “Zapatismo and beyond: Towards a theory of autonomy and its practice in North America”

final paper for a class on indigenous ways of knowing
2016

Personal Context

I grew up in the US state of Indiana, on land belonging to the Miami Nation, an Algonquin people who have continued to resist the dispossession of their land, including through forced removal to the state of Oklahoma between 1846 and 1871. Oblivious to this history, I began learning from and supporting indigenous struggles in 2009 as a staff member of the Mexico Solidarity Network, whose office is on Ojibwe land in Chicago and was formed in 1998 to coordinate solidarity with the Zapatistas, a Mayan indigenous movement of Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolobal, Chol, Mam, and Zoque peoples in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

As an adherent to the Zapatistas’ Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (EZLN, 2005), the Mexico Solidarity Network (MSN) seeks to build autonomy from below – through community mobilization and not governmental policy – and to the left – against colonial capitalism. Specifically for MSN, this means community building with undocumented Mexican, Guatemalan, and Ecuadorian immigrant families through its Chicago community centre, the Centro Autónomo, lending material support to the Zapatistas and other groups in Mexico who adhere to the Sixth Declaration, and bringing university student-activists to Mexico to learn about autonomy from the Zapatistas so they may integrate this political practice into their organizations back home (Mexico Solidarity Network, 2009).

Despite having moved to Toronto in 2015 and no longer being a staff member there, the Mexico Solidarity Network continues to be my political home and a group to which I am accountable, and my current studies at York University are dedicated to supporting their political project and its solidarity with the Zapatistas. The EZLN is very clear in telling those who wish to be its allies what its expectations are, asking “And what are you doing?” (EZLN, 2016: 326). Their recent book on the capitalist Hydra contextualizes this question, stating that we must resist this many-headed beast while also building autonomous alternatives, and each group must do this from their own geography and according to their own calendar. This is the work of decolonization, and I hope this paper will allow me to think through the methodology of this work.

Continue reading “Indigenous Ways of Knowing for Non-Indigenous Allies”

final paper for a Cultural Studies class on the everyday
2015

Murals abound in the Zapatista caracol of Oventic. The caracoles (literally, conch shell or spiral) are centres of autonomous government for the surrounding indigenous, peasant Zapatista communities. Their one-storey wooden structures are home to womens’ artisanal cooperatives, assembly spaces, offices of the municipal and regional levels of Zapatista self-government, medical clinics, and computer labs featuring dial-up speed internet. The institution that consistently hosts the most people is Oventic’s secondary school, where a few hundred Zapatista youth live during the weekdays and learn in both Spanish and Tzoztil languages. The school is covered in dozens of murals – nearly every square inch of the seven buildings that comprise the campus. Typical of the confused romanticization that has long been foisted upon Zapatismo, images of these murals abound on the internet, yet most of the “Zapa-tourists” who post them mistakenly attribute their authorship to the Zapatistas.

The truth is that most of the murals were painted by North American student-activists who spent one or two months in Oventic at the Zapatista language school through the Mexico Solidarity Network’s study abroad program. In typical Freirian style (1999), the language school teaches student-activists the philosophy, history, and practice of autonomy through Spanish language instruction. Given the cultural divide between their indigenous hosts and the international visitors, not to mention that almost all Zapatistas speak Spanish as a second language, daily interactions between students and their hosts in Oventic are many times awkward. Yet their murals – with common references to women’s leadership, the liberation of land/ecology, and corn and weaving as metaphors for resistance– represent the powerful inspiration of having visited liberated territory. One of the most powerful symbols is the caracol or spiral, which rejects linear progress in favour of the slow, circular expansion necessary for transforming all aspects of everyday life. Rather than pursuing the capital-R Revolution, the caracol is the strategy of “questioning as we walk,” of action and reflection, of a reflexive methodology in pursuit of liberation.

Continue reading “Walking the caracol: Towards a methodology of everyday life”

a Comprehensive paper for my doctoral program in Environmental Studies
2018

In the years since they seized over five hundred plantations on January 1, 1994 the Zapatistas have built a wide-ranging autonomous project, including founding a school in each of hundreds of communities. In these schools curriculum developed collectively by Zapatista communities is taught by Zapatista teachers in both Spanish and Mayan languages. As in so many other areas of their autonomy, the shift has been enormous, creating instances like the one pictured here (Klein, 2015, p.253).

If our thinking were to remain within the frame of this photo, we might see this simply as a touching example of progress through education. We might imagine the child’s pride in teaching his grandmother a new skill and her thankfulness for gaining literacy after all these years. Yet I would urge us to zoom out from the frame and ask certain questions: What sort of struggle did it take to get here? How many generations of resistance and how much sacrifice did it entail? What were all the overlapping, violent, terrorizing structures that kept women from learning to read for hundreds of years? And what was this grandmother’s participation in the struggle for freedom from this oppression? We know the Zapatistas coordinated an uprising, so did she prepare food for the soldiers, lose a daughter or husband in the fighting, hide arms, or get displaced from her home? Did she recruit her family members to the organization? And if she lives today on land reclaimed in 1994, does she work on a communal plot to support the teacher who taught her grandson to read? Or does she work in a weaving cooperative that shares its proceeds? Maybe the biggest question of all is this: what does it take for a generation of indentured serfs to produce a generation capable of teaching them to read? This is the true extent of social movement. It is this understanding of social movements, as interventions into social relations, that I will explore in this essay. Beyond raising awareness, changing policy, or altering who administers government, “social movement as social intervention” means people coming together to destroy the very relationships that confine one generation to illiteracy and to forge the relationships that allow another generation to build freedom.

Continue reading “Social relations and social movement theory”

Written as a Comprehensive paper for my doctoral program in Environmental Studies
2018

Autonomy gets a lot of grief from the rest of the left. For many it is little more than a mis-guided slogan to “change the world without taking power” (Holloway, 2002). Autonomy is lambasted as both abandoning structural change for puny, small-scale actions and for a naïve utopianism – “freedom without conditions, without constraints, without restrictions, action according to one’s own will and thinking without limits” (Thwaites Rey, 2011, p.145). Harvey sees it as a defeatist politics:

“What remains of the radical left now operates largely outside of institutional or organised oppositional channels, with the hope that small-scale actions and local activism can ultimately add up to some kind of satisfactory macro alternative …. Autonomist, anarchist, and localist perspectives and actions are everywhere in evidence. But to the degree that this left seeks to change the world without taking power, so an increasingly consolidated plutocratic capitalist class remains unchallenged in its ability to dominate the world without constraint.” (2014, pp.xii-xiii)

Bohm et al write that autonomy is not only wrong on strategy, but also mistaken in calling for a break with capital, writing that “Despite the discourse of self-determination and self-organization at the heart of autonomous movements, autonomy cannot be seen to be detached from accumulation processes of capital, nor from liberal democracy or development …. Autonomy cannot claim to have an essential ‘ground’, a space which is completely ‘beyond’ capital, the state or development” (2010, p.19). The editors of Marxism and Social Movements are perhaps the most severe in their condemnation of autonomy:

Continue reading “Autonomy, alienation, and life beyond capitalism”

Notes on Critical thought in the face of the capitalist hydra
2016

Below is an attempt at summarizing material concerning resistance and rebellion that I pulled together from various passages throughout the book. I admit I’ve also editorialized a wee bit.

Rebellion and resistance – a collective No! and Yes!

To rebel – to stand up to power and say “Enough is enough!,” To resist – to live in the way we dream of. We rebel against exploitation and resist by forming cooperatives. We rebel against dispossession and resist by taking back the land. We rebel against discrimination and resist by celebrating our dignity and diversity. We rebel against repression and resist by building healthy, self-protected communities.

All these processes are about building: transforming pain into rage, rage into rebelliousness, and rebelliousness into a future.

And as adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, our duty to rebel and resist specifically means being anticapitalist, committing to struggle, and organizing from below with the people where we are. Above all, it’s a commitment to collectivity, because anything that is worth doing should be done collectively. Collectively with NADIE: the no-ones who work the land and run the machines, the no-ones who makes the wheels of history turn, the no-ones who the Zapatistas owe their freedom to, the no-ones who will survive the gathering storm.

Continue reading “Resistance and rebellion, according to the Zapatistas”