International Zapatismo: The Construction of Solidarity in the Age of Globalization by Thomas Olesen, 2005. Zed Books, 256 pages, $27.50 paperback.
If you set out to write a book on Zapatista solidarity networks, there are two obvious stories you could tell. One is about a relatively small band of mostly indigenous rebels in Mexico who launched a brief uprising against the Mexican government in 1994. They then managed to survive the wrath of the Mexican state for over a decade, and even managed to carve out spaces for their own autonomous, revolutionary government, all without firing a shot—largely by their brilliant ability to mobilize international support. The other story would be slightly different. It would begin by telling how a tiny band of would-be Marxist guerrillas arrived in Chiapas to create a rebel army. Instead, they ended up immersed in a series of conversations and experiments with the indigenous communities they had come to organize, shattering their Marxist orthodoxies and causing both groups to reinvent together the very notion of revolution. Those ideas then played a key role in inspiring a generation of young activists across the planet to break out of the paralysis in which the left had been cast at the end of the Cold War and begin to build a new global movement against capitalism.
In a way, International Zapatismo, based on the doctoral research of a young Danish sociologist, tries to tell both. This makes a certain amount of sense, since the two are clearly related. But it is remarkably ambitious for a slender volume of only about 200 pages. Not to mention one that, at the same time, attempts to introduce new theoretical models for social movement theory. The result is brilliant and abrupt, evocative and technical, the kind of book that alternates between insightful reflections on the notion of “dignity” and flow charts of network systems.
In essence, Olesen’s argument is that the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) was successful first of all because it appeared at exactly the right moment—at the very beginning of a periodic upsurge in the cycle of global social movements—and were the first to use the Internet as their major means of communication. The end of the Cold War marked a moment of opportunity, as the conceptual frameworks by which political actors interpreted the world had been thrown into disarray. Olesen devotes the second chapter of the book to developing a theory of such frames. What the Zapatistas managed to do, then, was to place themselves at the center of the global consciousness of an emerging “transnational counterpublic” by turning their own local frames into models for ever-broader schemas of interpretation. Thus, they became more than an indigenous movement by reframing the marginalization of indigenous peoples as a model for all forms of marginalization in Mexican society; then, they became more than a Mexican movement by reframing the neoliberal policies of the Mexican state as a model for new ways of looking at an unjust world order.
This was not, the author usefully stresses, simply a matter of the EZLN manipulating the media or the Web. Their relation to the Internet was never direct; it was always “mediated” by Internet activists who became the core of their support in North America and Europe. Yet their ideas, particularly about new forms of democracy, then went on to inspire new experiments in organization, particularly in anarchist circles. The relation between computer activists and indigenous militants was obviously structurally unequal, but all sides did their best to overcome previous forms of “ideological solidarity” or “rights solidarity” to develop a new ethos of “mutual solidarity”—to help and learn from each other as equals. The book ends with the “silence” of the EZLN and the global effects of 9/11; it does not extend to the creation of the caracoles or the new Zapatista initiative to form a unified front of the non-electoral Mexican left.
Myself, I am relatively innocent of social movement theory. My only authority here derives from my involvement in Zapatista support groups, which puts me (as a professional anthropologist) in the rather unfamiliar role of being a “native.” As such, my only real discomfort with the book comes not from what’s said but from what isn’t. The EZLN, for example, is the first revolutionary army to deploy poetry as a means of political struggle. Yet it does often feel the author’s own meta-frames serve more to capture and contain—rather than facilitate—what the author once (citing political theorist John Holloway) calls the “overflowing” quality of Zapatista language. Particularly striking is the peculiar absence of what is perhaps the most poetic notion of all: “revolution.” Unlike “democracy,” or “human rights,” which are constant themes, the word “revolution” does not even appear in the book’s index. But in my experience this is precisely what the Zapatistas’ radical supporters felt was most inspiring about them. Just when it seemed like revolutionary dreams had to be placed in permanent suspension, an “army of dreamers” appeared to redefine and revitalize the entire concept. They required us to rethink the idea of revolution as the creation of forms of autonomy, rather than seizing control of the state—thus reinventing the paradigm for an age of globalization in which state borders were increasingly irrelevant, and providing the means by which dreadlocked teenagers in Brussels or computer hackers in Brazil could imagine themselves as revolutionaries once again.
To write so poetically, however, would require of Olesen to break out of the rather restrictive social movement theory framework and adopt a language that has, in fact, been shared by most sides of the conversation: from Marx’s famous assertion that a revolutionary class must represent its own alienation as a model for that of humanity in general, to debates among Italian autonomist theorists over whether computer hackers, or indigenous peoples, are more likely to provide the new focus of revolutionary struggle—a debate apparently resolved, in practice, by the alliance that Olesen so skillfully describes. Means of communication aren’t worth much without something to communicate; dreams cannot endure or effect change without an autonomous space in which to disseminate them. However distancing the language, Olesen is ultimately right in seeing this nexus—of bold experiments, on the ground and in spatial networks—as the future of the left.
About the Author
David Graeber is an activist and anthropologist recently fired from Yale University under mysterious circumstances. To learn more and sign a petition, visit http://www.geocities.com/graebersolidarity.
