Since the occupation of January 1994, many have projected their hopes onto this 'exotic' struggle against 'neo-liberalism'. We examine the nature of the Zapatista uprising by moving beyond the bluster of the EZLN communiqués, on which so many base their analysis.

Not proletarian, yet not entirely peasant, the Zapatistas' political ideas are riven with contradictions. We reject the academics' argument of Zapatismo's centrality as the new revolutionary subject, just as we reject the assertions of the 'ultra-left' that because the Zapatistas do not have a communist programme they are simply complicit with capital. We see the Zapatistas as a moment in the struggle to replace the reified community of capital with the real human community. Their battle for land against the rancheros and latifundistas reminds us of capital's (permanent) transitions rather than its apparent permanence.

We have not previously felt moved to comment on the Zapatista uprising, not because we have had no interest, but because we distrusted the way in which so many were quick to project their hopes onto this 'exotic' struggle. Everyone from anarchists to Marxist-Leninists, indigenous people's freaks to social democrats, primitivists to 'Third World' developmentalists - all seemed able to see what they wanted in the struggle in Chiapas.

Subcommandante Marcos, the shrewd EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista de Nacional Liberacion) spokesman, maximised the attractiveness and impact of the Zapatistas on progressive opinion by maintaining a conscious ambiguity around their politics. For us, however, his demagogic appeals to 'liberty! justice! democracy!' were something with which we had little affinity. It was apparent that making sense of the uprising would require an understanding of what the Indians were doing on the ground, distinct both from the way their spokespeople chose to portray the struggle, and from the way in which this representation was taken up to fulfil the needs of political actors in very different situations.

Two currents have attempted to go beyond the cheerleading for the Zapatistas to provide a more theoretical grasp of this movement. 'Autonomist Marxism', now largely based in academia, has embraced the Chiapas revolt, seeing it as central to a new recomposition of the world working class. On the other hand a much more critical response can be found in a number of 'ultra left'[1] inspired articles. As both tendencies favour autonomous class struggle and oppose traditional leftist ideas, why such different conclusions on the rebellion?

On one level we can see it as a matter of a different theoretical approach. While the autonomists focus on the movement of struggle, thinking in terms of a generalisation of Zapatismo, the 'ultra left' look more to the content of Zapatista politics - their programme - the limits of which they identify in the democratic and nationalist framework into which the Indians' struggle has been projected.[2] At the same time, while the autonomists wish to move with the mood of solidarity and inspiration the uprising has created, the 'ultra left' are disturbed by the way that identification with the EZLN is functioning, which has similarities to the role of anti-imperialist and Third Worldist ideology in the past. Support for existing struggle can become an ideological identification which represses criticism. However, criticism of struggle does not have to lead to an ideological turn against it.

Our interest in the struggle in Mexico is how it expresses the universal movement towards the supersession of the capitalist mode of production. One needs to avoid acting as judge of every manifestation of this universal movement, dismissing those manifestations which don't measure up, while at the same time avoiding uncritical prostration before such expressions. The real movement must always be open, self-critical, prepared to identify limits to its present practice, and to overcome them. Here it is understood that communism 'is not an ideal to which reality must accommodate itself.' Our task is to understand, and to be consciously part of something which already truly exists - the real movement that seeks to abolish the existing conditions.

Introduction: The Mexican context

In past issues of Aufheben we have examined the retreat by the international bourgeoisie from the use of social democracy as a form of mediating class struggle, and asked whether it may reappear from future class struggle. So far we have focused our attention on Europe and North America. The retreat from social democracy is not confined to these areas, however. Class struggle in Mexico has been distorted for decades by a particularly durable strain of social democracy, personified by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI).

Social democracy is everywhere in retreat in Mexico. But the recent nine-month strike by students of the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) over tuition fees and the electricity workers' successful campaign against privatisation of the power grid are both indications of a new climate of resistance to the waves of economic rationalisation. Marching together in Mexico City demanding the release of political prisoners, they have formulated the beginnings of an alternative to so-called 'neoliberalism'[3] - an alternative, it must be said, that as yet appears unable to move beyond the crushing weight of social democracy that is the heritage of the Mexican working class.

If anything in the recent history of class struggle in this gigantic country is able to look practically beyond social democracy, to the possibility of the constitution of human community over the reified community of capital, it is the struggle of the Zapatista Indians of Chiapas.

A brief chronology[4]

The Zapatistas first came to the attention of Mexico, and the world, when they occupied the Chiapan towns of San Cristobal de las Casas, Las Margaritas, Altamirano and Ocosingo on January 1st 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was due to begin operation. After destroying civil records and reading out their proclamation of revolt from the balcony of the Town Hall, the EZLN laid siege to the nearby military base of Rancho Nuevo, capturing weapons and releasing prisoners from the region's jails. The Mexican army responded savagely. The Zapatista army was dislodged relatively easily from the towns (although there was quite a fight in Ocosingo) and air force bombers followed the retreating indigenous soldiers back into the highlands, Los Altos. January 10th saw a half-million strong demonstration for peace in Mexico City.

Within days the President, Carlos Salinas, unnerved by the sympathetic attention the Indians were receiving and the jitters of the stock market, which had lost 6.2% of its value since the uprising had begun, called a halt to the bombings and summary executions. February and March saw peace negotiations take place in San Cristobal, at which time the popular image of the rebel Indian dressed in black, wearing a ski-mask and toting a gun became an archetype. This period also saw the beginning of the Mexican media's love affair with Subcommandante Marcos, the apparent spokesman of the EZLN.

Despite visible headway, the differences between the ladino (European blood) politicians and the indigenous peasant were irreconcilable. The PRI wished to limit the negotiations, and therefore the uprising itself, to the status of a 'local difficulty.' The Indians wanted to intervene politically on a much broader scale. Once the negotiations had ended, the EZLN representatives took the proposals back to the village assemblies of the Zapatista heartlands where, after three months of discussion, they were massively rejected. A return to war, however, was little more than suicide.

To overcome this bind, the Zapatistas decided to call a National Democratic Convention (CND) in their jungle base of the Lacandon. Coming weeks before the Presidential election, which is held every six years in Mexico, the CND would be an opportunity to bring all the anti-PRI elements of 'civil society' together to discuss strategy. But if the Convention was a success in terms of the numbers attending, and therefore a timely morale-booster for the besieged Indians, nothing concrete came of it. Defined only by their hatred of the PRI, these disparate groups could agree on nothing: the inspiration they took from the struggle of the Indians did not translate into a common political project.[5] With the routine re-election of the PRI candidate, Ernesto Zedillo, later that month, the EZLN went into crisis and stayed quiet at the national level for a number of months.

Throughout 1994-95 though, the Indians of eastern Chiapas were seizing more and more land (over 1,500 properties representing more than 90,000 hectares were taken in the period up to June 1995), evicting landowners and organising their new villages into autonomous municipalities. Protected from the violence of the landowner's private armies, the Guardias Blancas (White Guards) and other assorted goons by the implied threat of EZLN guns, these municipalities, of which there are currently thirty-two, were growing ever larger and threatened to encroach upon the vital oil fields of north-east Chiapas. Meanwhile the army tightened its cordon, building new roads and bases.

December 1994 saw the EZLN break through the blockade and surround the Mexican army, before disappearing into the countryside. In Mexico City, investment flooded out of the stock market after Zedillo was forced to devalue the peso dramatically, an action as traditional for the PRI as their routine polling victories. In February 1995 the army launched a new offensive with much destruction of villages and crops. Demonstrations were immediate in Mexico City. Now the slogan was not 'Peace in Chiapas' but 'We are all Zapatistas'. Once again the army quickly called off their bludgeoning.

Later that year new peace talks began in the Zapatista town of San Andres Larrainzar. The PRI would discuss only indigenous issues, and refused to countenance any Zapatista criticism of Mexico's new neoliberal economics. Although an Accord on Indigenous Rights and Cultures was signed, which the Zapatistas still view as a great victory, the PRI has since refused to implement it anywhere. This Accord was intended to be the first of five, but it was by now clear that the PRI were using the peace talks to buy time in which to further militarise eastern Chiapas. The EZLN cancelled the discussions.

July 1996, with the peace process still ostensibly going forward, saw the 'First Intercontinental Gathering for Humanity and against Neoliberalism' (Encuentro). Four thousand delegates from many different countries attended this inaugural conference in the Lacandon jungle. Two have been held since, in Spain and Brazil. Summer '96 also saw the appearance of a new guerilla group, the Ejercito Popular Revolucionario (EPR) which attacked the army in its home state of Guerrero. The EZLN refused to develop links with the EPR, accusing them of reproducing a particular type of vanguard model of armed struggle which is sometimes called foquismo in Latin America. The last couple of years has, however, seen a split in the EPR, from which the EPR-I (EPR-Indigenous) has emerged. This group has based itself on the Zapatista model and some links have been developed with the EZLN. However, recently the structure of the EPR-I has been affected by the capture and imprisonment of some of its leaders by the state.

Unable to reach any accommodation with the PRI yet unable to restart their war, the EZLN continue to find themselves at an impasse. The creation of the FZLN (Frente Zapatista de Nacional Liberacion) during 1996 was an attempt to provide a political forum outside Chiapas for 'civil society'. Set up by the Zapatistas, they themselves have refused to join, claiming that they might dominate proceedings. Subsequently the FZLN has been riven by the ideological ambitions of the Mexico City left, and is commonly considered a failure.

Since then the Zapatistas have fallen back upon nationwide publicity drives. These have the dual role of keeping their struggle and the militarisation of eastern Chiapas in the public eye, while simultaneously building solidarity networks as they reach out across Mexico. September 1997 saw 1,111 Zapatistas, one from each autonomous village, march from Chiapas to Mexico City, picking up supporters along the way. March 1999 saw La Consulta: 5000 male and female Zapatistas visited every municipality in Mexico in order to hold a ballot on indigenous rights and the military build-up in Chiapas.

Despite the blockade, the Mexican army is unable to break the power of the autonomous municipalities. This is partly because the measures needed to achieve this would result in eastern Chiapas becoming a charnel house, and the PRI has been unwilling to court that sort of international attention. The army for their part are reluctant. The generals know their troops come largely from Mexico's urban slums and have no real quarrel with the Zapatistas. A prolonged and vicious attack could quickly bring insubordination and mutiny into the picture. Indeed, according to one officer who has since fled to the US, around a hundred Mexican soldiers deserted in the opening weeks of the Chiapas war. Instead, the army have taken to training paramilitaries, for which they afterwards claim no responsibility. The group Mascara Rojo (Red Mask) carried out the Acteal massacre of December 1997, the single worst atrocity yet in this struggle, in which 45 EZLN sympathisers, including women and children, were gunned down. Naturally the PRI then use such moments to justify sending yet more troops into the area - in order to 'control the paramilitaries'. Even so, the army has occasionally been let off the leash: April to June 1998 saw attacks on the autonomous municipalities of Flores Magon, Tierra y Libertad and San Juan de Libertad. As a result of these and other incursions, the number of refugees in Chiapas is now over 20,000.

1999 saw better prospects. In September hundreds of UNAM strikers travelled to Chiapas for meetings with the EZ. Desperate to stop the two sides meeting, the army and police pulled out all the stops on the dirt roads leading to the autonomous communities, though a few got through. The UNAM occupation in Mexico City was smashed by an enormous dawn raid in February 2000 and hundreds of students incarcerated on ludicrous terrorism charges. The UNAM strike, the largest student movement since 1968, could have all sorts of effects on Mexico's class struggle. No doubt some students will be recuperated by the state but further contestation seems inevitable for many. The independent electricity workers union has also sent delegations to eastern Chiapas. In their fight against privatisation of the electricity grid they have formed a National Forum which has been joined by over two hundred independent union sections and other social organisations. The electristas appear to have won their battle, though the threat has been lifted partly because privatisation remains unpopular and 2000 is an election year. Rationalisation in the electricity industry could easily be resurrected by the bourgeoisie in 2001 or 2002. The soil in which these struggles are rooted is still fertile. As the Zapatista supporters in San Cristobal say 'Nobody in Mexico knows what will happen next.'

The present article is an attempt to analyse the nature of the Zapatista uprising by moving beyond the bluster of the EZLN communiques, on which so many base their analysis of the EZLN. First however, we must examine the roots of the modern state - the Mexican Revolution.

Part 1: The Roots of the Modern State

The Revolution is the touchstone of Mexican politics. The period saw the Mexican state begin its transformation from an oligarchical-landowners' government to the one-party corporatist model which survived for so long. The Revolution is also crucial to understanding the peculiar social base from which the Mexican state is constructed, with its formal recuperation of worker and peasant organisations, and its need to regularly embark upon sprees of revolutionary rhetoric. The revolution was driven forward by the peasants' attack on the latifundias, or large estates, the dominant mode of accumulation in Mexico at the time. Despite subsequent industrialization, the latifundias have persisted - even grown - and have remained a locus of class struggle ever since, most recently in Chiapas. To grasp the importance of land struggles in Mexico we need to understand how the latifundias operate, and how they plug into the cycles of national accumulation.[6]

The latifundias

The Porfiriato, the administration of Porfirio Diaz, ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1910. Its social base was the latifundistas, the large landowners, and it was their class interests that were transmitted through the government. The rapid industrialisation that Mexico was undergoing at the turn of the twentieth century was confined to tiny areas of the country, and the industrial bourgeoisie as a class were too weak to make much political headway in the Porfiriato. The large estates originated from the fallout of the Reform War, which had ended in 1867. The victorious Liberal wing of the oligarchy intended to create a limited system of small landholdings that would be constructed mainly from confiscated Church property and the expropriated communal land of Indians. But almost as soon as these smallholdings came into existence they were aggressively acquired by a new breed of landowner (the latifundista), the smallholder generally being unable to exist solely on his land. These smallholders became either poorly-paid day-labourers (i.e. seasonally employed) or debt-peons, little more than slaves. In the southern and central areas of Mexico, the latifundistas further expanded their property by violently evicting peasants (campesinos) from their ejidos (communal production units). This process produced continual class conflict in the countryside. The expansion of the latifundia property-form penetrated the countryside only to the extent that the local populace could be suppressed. Faced with widespread resistance, the landowners organised the Guardias Blancas (White Guards, usually campesinos-turned-bandit, in turn recruited back to the Side of Order). The fact that these brutal paramilitary groups have been a constant part of rural life ever since indicates that the peasants have never admitted defeat in the land war, and the landowners know it.

The latifundias, which were usually centred on a lavish, European-style hacienda, were the wellspring of surplus extraction in the economy. Sugar, coffee, cotton, India rubber: exported abroad, as well as serving the needs of the internal market, these were the sources of wealth for the landowning classes. And if the international trade cycle contracted, the latifundia could easily withdraw into limited, or even subsistence, production. The cost of the reproduction of labour fell always on the villages outside the property and never on the hacienda. While the elasticity of this form of accumulation accounts for its longevity, it was in many ways backward. The commodification of labour-power and money relations had spread to an extent throughout the agricultural sector, but were by no means universal. On many haciendas the landowners paid their workers in produce, or forced them to purchase from an employer's shop. Via this payment in kind campesinos usually ended up in debt, which tended to rise at a greater rate than the peasant was able to pay it off. As a result of this dependency, the campesino became a peon, tied forever to the hacienda. The fact that debts were passed on from father to son only helped to preserve this distorted form of value extraction. If a campesino attempted to escape, the Guardias Blancas would follow.

Zapatismo and the Ayala Plan

By 1911, revolt was breaking out in the north and centre of Mexico, triggered by the corruption of the Porfiriato and the violence of the landowners. In the countryside, the peasant uprising took the form of land seizures. It is the scale of the attack on the latifundias that is the defining characteristic of the Mexican Revolution. With the absence of fully-developed wage-relations, exploitation was more immediate: the campesinos were able to personally identify their class enemies and exact violent revenge. The Zapatista movement was the highpoint of these years. The campesinos of Morelos and Puebla constructed not only a revolutionary army, they also produced, in the Ayala Plan, a coherent political programme that asserted their needs against those of capital. The Ayala Plan spelled out in detail the Zapatista programme of land redistribution: broadly, expropriation of private land for public utility, dispossessed individuals and communities, with a guarantee of protection for small landholdings. The Plan was both a codification of what was already happening and a fillip to further land takeovers. Landlords, Mexican and foreign, were fleeing in their thousands.

With the landowners chased out of Morelos, the Zapatistas attempted to place limits on the future possibility of petty-bourgeois accumulation. One example is the proposal for agricultural banks, a confused attempt, but an attempt nevertheless, to temper the power of money in favour of social needs. Of course, had the land redistribution project been allowed to thrive with the continuation of money relations as a whole, a new generation of landowners would eventually have developed from the ranks of the revolutionary peasants. In the Ayala Plan we find a communist tendency towards communal land; at the same time a very uncommunist tolerance of small farmers, perfectly in keeping with what Teodor Shanin calls the 'different world' of the peasantry,[7] and which we shall examine later.

The end of the Morelos Commune

If the Zapatistas had, at least in the short term, resolved the contradiction of their class position by favouring the communal over the incipient bourgeois, in shared land rather than private property, they were unable to resolve a further contradiction, and one which led ultimately to the smashing of their stronghold, the Morelos Commune, by the reconstituted power of the state. While the revolutionary campesino was (almost literally) everywhere, they were unable as a class to move beyond their localist perspective. The Ayala Plan was the most sophisticated attempt to intervene on a national level - yet it talked about the land and nothing else. Unlike the revolutionary proletariat, separated forever from the means of production, they did not see the need to transcend their class, and with it all classes. The revolutionary working class needs to talk about everything in its attempts to generalise its struggles; the peasantry believes it needs only to talk about the land. The campesinos of this period had struggled around their needs, had largely succeeded, and now found themselves unable to develop further.

The revolutionary peasants who in December 1914 occupied Mexico City were undoubtedly one of the highest expressions of class struggle in the world at that time. The workers of Europe were drowning in their own blood and the Russian Revolution was still three years away. By contrast, the whole of Mexico was at the peasants' feet. The national power of the bourgeoisie was smashed and its survivors had retreated to the eastern port of Veracruz. Yet it was at precisely this moment that the traditional peasant deference, which is rooted in the contradictory nature of peasant existence and the cultural baggage that accompanies it, asserted itself. Refusing a political solution from within themselves, and trusting that military strength alone would prevail, they inadvertently left the door open to a weak but reconstituting state power. This inability to find a wider social perspective is at least something the present day Zapatistas, with all their limitations, have been obliged to overcome, while many of their campesino brothers and sisters in the west of Chiapas are still unable to make the jump from atomised deference to communal organisation.

The preamble to the Ayala Plan had ruled out any compromises with the bourgeois leader Madero and other 'dictatorial associates.' Yet the Zapatistas were chronically unable to see beyond their own backyard. This blindness to the threat of the state was the highest contradiction of the exemplary peasant movement of the Mexican Revolution.

The working class

Individually, many miners, railwaymen and textile workers joined the peasant Northern Division, which had entered into a de facto alliance with the Zapatista Southern Liberation Army. As a class, however, and despite a huge strike wave in 1906 , they remained quiet until 1915.

The peasant armies which had occupied Mexico City had failed to inspire working class support, or indeed relate to them in any way. As a result, in exchange for union concessions from the revolutionary bourgeoisie, the reformist federation of unions, the Casa del Obrera Mundial (COM) agreed to form 'Red Battalions' to fight the Northern Division and the Zapatisatas. Although this decision did not go unopposed - the electricians' union refused to abide by the pact - the Red Battalions fought alongside what were known as the Constitutionalist armies throughout 1915. Yet only a year later the working class was paying the price for this complicity. The new bourgeoisie, having beaten off the threat from the peasants, no longer needed the unions. COM headquarters was stormed by troops and unionists across the country arrested. The following year, 1916 , the first general strike in Mexican history was crushed. Despite this, however, the power of the organised working class remained formidable.

The 1917 Constitution

Just like the Revolution, the 1917 Constitution is a vital touchstone in Mexican life, a document that came into existence as a result of prolonged struggle, and is still held in high regard today by many sections of the working class and peasantry. The bourgeoisie clearly intended the new set of state rules to be a signal that the years of chaos and civil war were over and a new cycle of accumulation could begin.

Knowing the erosion of the gains of the Revolution would only be tolerated to a degree by the peasants and the working class, the new bourgeoisie institutionalised itself as the revolutionary party-state, marginalising competing currents within its own class by mobilising popular opinion. It is the evolution of this party-state that accounts for the lack of parliamentary democracy in Mexico, and explains the concentration of power in the hands of one man, the President. Despite many knocks this specific formation of the bourgeoisie has survived - just - the twentieth century.

In the advanced capitalist countries, the illusion of alternatives through democracy is at the centre of the reproduction and expansion of the capitalist mode of production. Democracy mediates between competing interests within the ruling class, while at the same time countering tendencies towards corruption in the relation between state and capital. In Mexico, there is a hole where this mediation might exist - a hole that is instead plugged by the extraordinary way in which workers' and peasants' organisations have been formally co-opted by the state.

Part 2: The Changing Face of the Institutional Revolution

Radical social democracy to the rescue

It was not until 1931 that labour's representatives were fully incorporated into the state. This acceptance of the working class as the working class, as a potentially antagonistic class who must be brought into the fold to neutralise their revolutionary impulses, is the basis of the social democracy the Mexican bourgeoisie utilised for decades. (As late as 1988, President Salinas could still trumpet the 'indestructible pact between the Revolutionary government and the working class.')

With its proximity to, and integration with, US capital, Mexico was profoundly affected by the Wall Street Crash. By 1934 the bourgeoisie had comprehensively failed to restore stable class relations for the accumulation of capital. Exacerbated by the Depression and the militant recomposition of both the peasantry and the proletariat, revolutionary change from below was once more on the agenda. If American capital-in-general was now reluctantly going along with the New Deal, the solution to the crisis in Mexico had to be far more radical. Most individual Mexican capitals recognised the objectively higher level of class struggle. The nightmare of 1914 haunted them more than ever. As such the Mexican ruling class's radical solution to the crisis opened up the possibility of fostering a movement that would not go home when it was told to, that could develop in its own direction and rupture forever the fabric of bourgeois society.

This radicalised form of social democracy came through the conduit of Lazaro Cardenas, President from 1934-40. His first and most important task was to sign a pact with the new CGOCM (Confederation of Workers and Peasants). By 1935 half of all Mexico's organised workers were in CGOCM and strikes were going through the roof. Cardenas immediately recognised the right to strike, poured money into CGOCM patronage and shifted the sympathy of the state's labour relations boards away from the employer and towards the working class as represented by the unions. In 1936 CGOCM was renamed the CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers) and recognised as the official national labour movement. The highpoint of the radical social democratic project came in 1938, with Cardenas's nationalisation of the largely US-owned oil industry. Cardenas manipulated the enthusiasm for this measure to generate a spirit of 'national unity', which he then used to crush the insurgent workers' movement.

It was not only the cities the radical party-state had to attend to in order to prevent social revolution breaking out. The countryside had ignited and sustained the Revolution, and could do so again. Cardenas's solution was a massive redistribution of land the like of which social democracy in Mexico has not been compelled to repeat. Naturally only the worst land was parcelled out - the property and interests of the hacendados left intact. While the Cardenas reforms appeared impressive, they not only preserved social relations in the rural areas, they bolstered and expanded commodity relations by creating a new class of small landowners. For the vast majority a small patch was unsustainable and seasonal wage-labour unavoidable. The ultimate result of the land reforms was marginalisation for the many, a new network of small competitive farming for some, and the consolidation of the lumbering latifundias.

In fact Cardenas had mobilised the working class in part to discipline those recalcitrant sections of the bourgeoisie who needed to be saved from themselves. After 1940 the bourgeoisie as a whole accepted the necessity of state intervention. Even more crucially, any revolutionary movement from below could be mediated through the now-reliable CTM or the new CNC (National Campesino Confederation). As part of the party-state, these organisations could deliver certain concessions, defuse proletarian and peasant anger through nationalist channels and turn a blind eye to repression if it was needed. The state had solved the crisis it had been mired in since the fall of the Porfiriato, and it has followed the same model until very recently: one party guaranteeing social democracy (peace between the officially-recognised antagonistic classes). Unlike the west, it has not needed the shield of formal bourgeois democracy to do so.

The Economy after 1940

The American Fordist model of accumulation, whereby increased productivity pays for higher wages, which in turn boosts demand, could not be followed in Mexico. The native bourgeoisie was too weak to innovate and had always relied on America for heavy industrial investment. The agricultural sector still lagged far behind that of America. While US capital may not consciously have wanted to keep Mexico underdeveloped, it saw it generally as fit only for natural resource and labour-power exploitation.

Mexico did, though, industrialise rapidly after 1940. The model was state-led capitalism with its own Mexican peculiarities. Investment in infrastructure was the province of the state. Petroleum, rail and communications sectors were all under state control, and the state generally carried out economic development which the private sector thought too risky. The resources of the state were augmented by huge foreign investment. Mexico has always been a natural first stop for America's foreign-bound surplus value; now it flooded over the border as a result of the post-war boom.

By the 1960s, Mexico had been enjoying its economic 'miracle' for some time. GDP had risen on average 6-7% annually. Profit flowed into state coffers, paying for an unofficial welfare state of sorts. However social inequality was reaching new extremes. By 1969 the proportion of national income going to the poorest half of the population was only 15%. In rural areas, as agricultural mechanisation increased and productive land was concentrated, the number of un- or underemployed was going up. Some, seeking to refuse proletarianisation, moved away from the agricultural heartlands and attempted to chip out a living from barely cultivatable land - this being the option many Chiapan Indians took; many moved to the cities to join the reserve army and effectively kept factory and workshop wages down; some became migrant workers following the harvests through Morelos, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosi and Veracruz. Still others crossed the border into the US.[8]

In the towns and cities even the organised industrial proletariat suffered from low wages. While they were relatively well off compared to those in small workshops or the unemployed, struggling to survive in any way that they could, their wages were a fraction of their US counterparts'. Their union organisation militated for higher wages, yet this was offset by the absolute corruption of the charros (union bureaucrats), who would often swipe their members' dues. More than anything being in a strong union meant a guarantee of a job, a buttress against unemployment.

However, for the 'pillars of society', those sections of the population incorporated into the party-state, the costs of the reproduction of labour were paid, after a fashion - by the 'PRI welfare state'. It is difficult to quantify, but the far-reaching web of the PRI guaranteedan existence for those sections of society it needed to perpetuate itself. Whether it be official (wage rises) or unofficial (backhanders, protection or the elimination of a rival), it all had to be paid for. The corruption of the PRI welfare state has certainly retarded the efficiency of Mexican industry, prompting many members of the bourgeoisie to defect to the PAN (National Action Party), the pro-business Catholic party set up in the 1930s to oppose the Cardenist reforms.

The 1959 Movements

1958-59 saw a sustained offensive by the proletariat over both wage levels and the control of union charros.[9] It is difficult to know to what extent working class self-activity was mediated; certainly the railwaymen's, electricians' and teachers' strikes were led by the Communist Party, and all the ideological drag of Stalinism was present. Dissident Marxist leaders were also prominent, but presumably their beliefs were variations on a theme. However, the fact that the Communist Party was proscribed from 1946 to 1977 meant that following them led to an immediate challenge to the law of the land: the 1959 movements led frequently to violent confrontation with the state.

Capital also reacted to 1959. Wary of the working class's proven power over the railways, much investment now shifted into air freight and automobile production to begin a new round of accumulation - and struggle.

Mexico's '68

By the late 60s the inability of the PRI to reform and democratise itself was apparent to many sections of society, and was a major contributing factor to the student revolt of 1968. These students were bent on giving cardiac therapy to the cadaver of the Revolution - determined to rejuvenate the egalitarianism of the 1917 Constitution. The movement, in its concentrated phase of July - October became radicalised through its many violent confrontations with the state. Their numbers were swollen by pissed-off proletarians angry at the spectacle and expenditure of the imminent Olympic Games. Ten days before the Games were due to open, around five hundred students were killed and 2,500 wounded in the Tlatelolco massacre. The army attack, which has been marked every year since by demonstrations, finally blew the lid off the PRI's claims to revolutionary legitimacy. It also damaged the party-state in more concrete ways: traditionally unconcerned about using clubs and bullets against workers and peasants, the PRI now found itself shooting down middle class students - its the natural constituency for reproduction.

Many students, though, were brought back 'within budget' after a time in prison. Those who had moved beyond a critique of the PRI to a wider critique of capitalism were forced out of Mexico City to towns and cities that carried less personal risk. For those being actively pursued by the state, this meant disappearing into Mexico's vast hinterlands. There is a direct lineage from the Tlateloloco massacre to the many guerilla groups that appeared in the rural margins in the early 1970s. Tainted by the militarist ideology of Che or Mao, these were all smashed with the help of the CIA by 1975.

The early 1970s - economic crisis

And there was a new problem. The economic boom stemming from the industrialisation process and the PRI employment protection racket, which had partly offset the traditional role of the reserve army, meant the nationalised industries were severely overmanned and inefficient, and run by an entrenched working class accustomed to relatively high wages.

They say that when America sneezes, Mexico catches a cold. Now mired in its own crisis of accumulation, America in the early 1970s was taking Mexico down with it. As capital increasingly freed itself from national boundaries, transforming itself into highly mobile finance capital, investment flooded away from the industrial heartlands of both North America and Mexico to the Pacific Rim economies.

The recession gave the bourgeoisie less scope for conceding the above-inflation wage rises that had headed off trouble in the past. As a result the negotiating position of the charros was considerably weakened. With the ideals - and repression - of the student movement fresh, the working class, particularly from 1973, began a series of strikes, go-slows and demonstrations. Just like 1959, their demands were over wages and the removal of corrupt union leaders: a struggle for autonomy that raised the possibility of going beyond the trade union form as such. The movement organised new unions outside the CTM and formed currents of resistance within it.[10] The fact that the workers had often to physically fight the charros and their goons, who sometimes used the tools of disappearance and assassination, meant that the CTM could easily and visibly be identified as the enemy. While few workers seem to have used this as an opportunity from which to develop a critique of wage-labour, there can be no doubt that the mid '70s strike movement increased both the self-confidence of the Mexican working class, and the sense of their being an antagonistic class, the opposition to, and negation of, the bourgeoisie.

The movement reached its height in 1976. The radical electricians' union, who had brought together new unions, urban squatter groups, and peasant organisations to form the 'National Front of Labour, Peasant and Popular Insurgency', now called a national strike. The administration responded by sending the army to occupy every electrical installation in Mexico. This was only the most visible of the many acts of repression which pushed the new labour militancy into defeat.

The state also responded with massive social spending. Foreign investment, however, was flooding out of Mexico. Moreover, state expenditure on unproductive industries staffed by rebellious workers was never going to solve the crisis of accumulation. Then an unexpected and propitious discovery gave the bourgeoisie room to manoeuvre - oil.

Oil boom - and bust

As a result of the oil boom, the economy was growing at around 8% by the end of the 1970s. Not only had the discovery of new petroleum deposits pulled Mexico out of the recession that had begun in 1973, the growth and concomitant wage rises had served to head off the snowballing class struggle.

The oil still in the ground off the Yucatan peninsula and in Chiapas was used as collateral for huge loans from abroad. Western banks, stuffed with surplus petrodollars as a result of the OPEC oil price hike eagerly lent out these vast sums to Mexico and many other 'Third World' nations. The loans were used to cover both the trade and the budget deficits.

The bourgeoisie assumed the price of oil would continue to rise, as it had done since 1973: the extent of their loans was predicated on future oil revenue. However, the price of oil dropped sharply after 1979. Coupled with rising interest rates that pushed the external debt ever higher, Mexico in 1982 was unable to keep to its scheduled repayments. By then, the nation owed $92.4 billion, the third largest international debt after the US and Brazil. In August of that year, Mexico triggered the international debt crisis by declaring a moratorium on its repayments. In so doing it brought the international banking system to the edge of collapse. Western banks were soon refusing loans of any kind to the whole of Latin America which was consequently plunged into a decade-long recession.

In a desperate attempt to stem the haemorrhaging of capital, the then-President Lopez Portillo in almost his final act nationalised the banks. In so doing he followed firmly in the tradition of PRI economic nationalists who blame foreign, and especially US, capital of bleeding their country dry. In fact the bank nationalisation was the last time the economic nationalist card was be played with any real content.

The Lost Decade

1982-1992 is sometimes called the Lost Decade in Mexico. The story is a familiar one: having to go to the IMF for money to keep the economy afloat, the PRI found themselves obliged to roll the state back from the arena of capital. This meant bringing the budget deficit under control, removing state subsidies to industry and agriculture, and lowering wages in order to stem the runaway inflation which had been fuelled by the oil mirage. State enterprises were privatised by the fistful, usually offloaded at below market value to PRI cronies. And 1986 saw Mexico finally joining GATT after years of protectionism: many companies went bankrupt as a result.

In December 1987 the Economic Solidarity Pact was signed by representatives of government, the unions and business. (Many of these union leaders had come to prominence through the struggles of the 1970s). Restraint in wage demands and price controls on consumer goods was agreed. The Pact was nothing less than an attempt to preserve the social fabric so that restructuring could go ahead unfettered. But its very existence raised the possibility of its being wrecked by a new proletarian offensive.

Unfortunately the terrain of struggle had changed. While the struggle for autonomy in the 1970s had ended at the time of the oil boom, capital was now in a much less expansive position. If the crisis of accumulation was to be solved restructuring was essential. The offensive anti-charro struggles of the working class now became purely defensive and economic. As plants were closed or privatised, workers made redundant or had their wages lowered, the struggle oriented itself around sectional bread-and-butter issues, which engendered fragmentation. Better-paid CTM workers were still relatively protected, and the 1970s generation of charros were consequently in a much more credible position to mediate struggle. And if the situation became desperate, there was always the allure of the US border for the desperate proletarian.

Two moments from the 1980s indicate, however, that overt class antagonism had not vanished from the Mexican landscape. The first is to be found in the weeks following the devastation caused by the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. With the government paralysed, the residents of Mexico City's barrios formed themselves, initially, into rescue and medical teams, and shortly thereafter into community groups. These groups both rebuilt houses and prevented the incursions of landlords, many of whom wished to use the earthquake as an excuse to evict their tenants and rebuild the neighbourhoods with middle class housing at middle class prices. From these autonomous working class formations came a network of self-help groups, groups that make up part of what the Zapatistas call 'civil society'.[11]

A more dissipated, but nevertheless important response to the austerity programme was the Presidential election of 1988. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a renegade PRI politician, stood against the PRI - and 'won'. Soon afterwards he formed the PRD, now the 'official' left opposition in Mexico. The PRD is very much old school PRI: for state intervention, increased welfare, a measure of land redistribution, against GATT and NAFTA. Prior to 1988, the PRI had only to manage electoral fraud on a gubernatorial level. The Cardenas challenge was so unexpected and so overwhelming that the party-state panicked and fixed the results in the crudest possible manner. Mexico City was immediately alive with anti-PRI demonstrations. The TV screens showing the polling percentages had simply gone blank for hours, and mountains of votes marked for Cardenas were found piled on the Distrito Federal's rubbish tips or floating down Mexico's waterways.

Elections in Mexico often carry such a heavy coercive element that they can be a world away from the pure bourgeois individuality of elections in the West. PRIistas are usually present in gangs around the ballot boxes, and refusal to vote the right way could mean losing a job, having your child barred from school or simply being given a beaten. Thus a refusal to vote PRI is not taken lightly, and is much more likely to occur after discussions and agreement with friends and neighbours. This need to come together collectively immediately and paradoxically raises the possibility of a world beyond democracy.

The Tequila Effect and Beyond

With cheap American commodities just over the border, Mexico is adept at sucking in goods from abroad, leading to periodic crises in the balance of payments which have usually been solved by devaluing the peso. The peso was overvalued in 1994 - but everyone assumed the PRI had sufficient foreign currency reserves to protect it. In fact these reserves had fallen from $33bn in February to only $2.5bn in December, money which had been used to cover the yawning balance of payments deficit. Such a dramatic erosion also shows just how quickly the relatively protected Mexican market was opened up by NAFTA. On the 20th of December, the new Zedillo administration announced a one-off devaluation of 15%. Panicked foreign investors scrambled to get out of both pesos and Mexico. The PRI used the last of its foreign currency reserves to bolster the peso, but two days later it was forced to float the currency on the markets, where it dropped 40% against the dollar.

With the dollar such an important factor in Mexico - companies and the government generally having their loans denominated in dollars - the devaluation now meant the debt burden in the economy had risen massively. International debt default seemed once again to be on the cards. And what was being called the Tequila Effect could spread - for Latin America, only recently recovered from the years of international finance isolation that had resulted from the 1982 default, this would be nothing short of catastrophic. Despite the isolationists in Washington, a $50bn rescue package was put together by the US and IMF, specifically to service short-term debt. In March 1995 the PRI announced an austerity programme that included a 10% cut in government spending, increased VAT, fuel and electricity price rises and imposed credit restraints.

Meanwhile, with interest rates soaring at 120%, many businesses and mortgage-owners were unable to keep up their repayments, despite a new government subsidy for the middle class. Seven banks collapsed and needed rescuing by the government. The true cost of this bailout only became apparent in 1999 - $93bn, nearly 20% of GDP! This debt, which is accruing 18% yearly interest, and which the PRI has hidden from public accounts, falls due in 2003. Unless it is restructured soon, the Mexican capitalist class may find themselves in trouble yet again.

The response of the working class to this austerity package was determined by the depth of the recession that followed. Unlike 1987, the CTM refused to sign an economic pact with the government and business. Consequently there was no official policy of wage restraint during this crucial time. But the refusal to endorse austerity was hardly in response to a militant working class movement within the CTM tent. Rather it was because, their social base undermined by privatisation, the CTM now found itself in much stiffer competition with independent unions and was compelled to posture a little more credibly. Neither, however, were the independent unions arenas of militant anti-austerity. Shocked by the scale of the 1995 recession - one million out of work, another four million working less than fifteen hours a week - the working class was unable to move beyond the fragmentation wrought by the economy and which the trade union form accepts. Furthermore, the PRIs targeted anti-poverty programme PRONASOL, which had come into being as a result of the 1988 election shock, offset some of the very worst effects of the recession.

Some fantasise that the devaluation was a punitive measure directed at the working class lest they become overly-inspired by the Chiapas rebellion; others that Zedillo deliberately elected to expose the economy to crisis and therefore force a period of capitalist restructuring. Neither position is tenable: by December 1994 the Zapatistas' initial impact had evaporated and the uprising was militarily contained - indeed the PRI had secured a new incumbent in the Presidential Palace. And the depth of the recession, which the PRI could not have forseen, is surely proof that they never intended to engineer more than an simple adjustment in the balance of payments. Rather what we see is a crisis of confidence in the Mexican bourgeoisies' ability to manage accumulation on the part of global finance capital.

There is no doubt, however, that the recession has vigorously restructured sectors of the Mexican economy. The competitive edge that the devaluation gave to Mexican exports has been sustained. Oil, once such a key export, now accounts for only 10% of the country's export base. It is this export-led recovery that the capitalist class see as the fruit of the restructuring that has been taking place since the late 1980s, and which superficially appears to be as a result of NAFTA. For the working class, real wages have still not reached their pre-devaluation levels. More wage cuts and job insecurity is on the way as the privatisation bandwagon judders on and the old social contract is further destroyed.

The swift economic recovery from 1995 showed how successfully the PRI had reinvented itself as a party of neoliberal economics. They did not attempted to spend their way out of trouble, as they have done in the past. Instead they inflicted the harshest of free market medicines on the population. By stealing their policies, the PRI seemingly marginalised the PAN. Two related contradictions now beset the PRI however. The first was that with the opening up of Mexico to trade liberalisation, and the subsequent deluge of American commodities, the PRI could no longer bang the ideological drum of economic nationalism with any coherence. This may not have been a problem: the Mexican bourgeoisie have decades of practice at appearing to be masters of their own fate while having huge sections of their economy subordinated to the interests of American capital.

The second contradiction was more serious. By so dramatically reducing the size of the state sector, the party-state inevitably curtailed its own ability to dispense patronage and do favours.[12] The question for the PRI became: how successful could it be at maintaining its traditional network of influence and power, a network born out of a corrupt and state-led economy, in the face of the new competitiveness the free market demanded. With the PRI unable to solve this problem, a problem which undermined their own social base, Mexico could open up to all sorts of possibilities.

Part 3: A Commune in Chiapas?

Traditional accumulation and social structure

With its mountainous highlands and jungles, Chiapas can feel more a part of Central America than Mexico. The Distrito Federal of Mexico City, even San Cristobal, can seem a million miles away: unconnected and unimportant. Until the 1970s capital accumulation followed a stable and relatively backward model, necessitated by the geographical inaccessibility and remoteness of this state, and made viable by the rich lands. The Revolution barely reached Chiapas, and the latifundias were never broken up, although an echo can be heard in the contemporaneous slave revolts in the logging camps of the Lacandon.[13] Similarly the Cardenas reforms had little effect in the 1930s. Some land was redistributed, but it was all of poor quality, 'so steep the campesinos had to tie themselves to trees to plough, while the rancheros continued to hold great swathes in the rolling valleys.' [14]

The pattern of accumulation was, and to a large extent still is, based on expansive land holdings rather than developing the forces of production per se. Coffee, bananas and other tropical fruit are grown for export; cattle-raising is another source of profit for the rural Chiapan bourgeoisie. Crop-growing requires only seasonal labour-power, and cattle-rearing generally requires very little at all. Accumulation in these dominant industries has come not from improving productivity (though agricultural techniques have obviously improved over the years), rather it has come from extending the land available on which to grow or graze cattle. Chiapan landowners have, as a result, a reputation for being among the most violent in Mexico. Their business has literally been that of forcing people off fertile land. Because the landowners are mestizo (mixed blood) or ladino and those they are expropriating are invariably indigenous, the rural bourgeoisie are deeply racist - an important point to bear in mind when discussing the validity of some Zapatista ideas. Through this violent racism, the hacendados and latifundistas have been able to utterly dominate those Indians that have been allowed to remain as wage labourers or debt-peons. Whether this is by forcing employees to buy from the hacienda shop, raping their wives or daughters, or executing natives who try to organise, racism has buttressed the power of the landowner and served to nail the price of labour-power to the floor: it has greased the circuits of accumulation for decades. Backward Chiapan capital does not even have to worry about the costs of the reproduction of labour, as these have always been borne by the family unit in the impoverished local village. Depending on their size (large-scale agribusiness or medium-sized commercial growers) the landowner's capital may flow to the cities to be invested, often in speculative ventures. A large part of their profits also goes on conspicuous consumption, the flaunting of which further reinforces the rural hierarchy.

Their paying off of local caciques is perfectly in character for this underdeveloped form of accumulation. Caciques are rather like charros in that they can deliver some of the basic demands of the campesino and mediate his needs. They are usually older men who are involved in local commercial activities and have a reputation as fixers, usually with some access to local state funds. Many are PRIistas, most are corrupt and violent and all believe they 'serve the people'. In fact they serve to demobilise and suppress rural struggle and are invaluable to the landowners. Caciquismo itself has often been a focus for struggle, with predictably unsuccessful results.

The migratory flow of land refugees in Chiapas has been eastwards, as coffee growers expanded their plantations in the fertile Soconusco region of the state. In 1954 the landless, particularly Chol Indians, began arriving in the Lacandon. The trickle soon became a flood: Indians from Oaxaca made homeless by government dams, from Veracruz, evicted by Guardias Blancas, mestizo farmers from Guerrero and Michoacan. Much like the US border, the Lacandon was becoming a safety valve for the poverty and dispossession agricapitalist expansion was creating. The party-state saw this, recognised its value, and granted a number of land titles through government decree in 1957 and 1961. But the stampede into the Lacandon and consequent deforestation meant there was not enough land to go around, and what there was quickly became sterile. Those who had reckoned on avoiding proletarianisation by refusing to go to the cities now found they had to survive by selling their labour-power wherever they could and eking out some sort of existence on a tiny patch of barren land.

1970s - eviction and resistance in the Lacandon

By the early '70s, with the migration to the Lacandon unstemmed and living conditions becoming unbearable, revolt was in the air. In 1972 President Echeverria sought to ease the pressure cooker by officially redistributing land, believing this would also create a new class of Indian latifundistas. 645,000 hectares were to be given to sixty-six Indian heads-of-family;[15] the rest ordered to leave. There was immediate resistance to the evictions - and an influx of young activists into the region, Los Altos in particular. Many were students who had turned to Guevarist or Maoist ideology after their exile from Mexico City in 1968, now espousing an all-out guerilla war for which they were little prepared. An example was the Maoist group Linea Proletaria who sent brigades from Torreon and Monterrey after being invited to Chiapas by local liberation theology priests such as Bishop Samuel Ruiz.

With this mish-mash of Leninist activity, it is difficult to discover the autonomous content of the struggle against eviction from the Lacandon.[16]To muddy the water still further, it is plain that the vanguardists and the liberation theologists were not in competition for the hearts and minds of the campesinos, as some have suggested. Liberation theology, which we shall look at in more detail below, had a high Marxist component in the mid-1970s: some priests refused sacraments to those who opposed Linea Proletaria; in turn the Maoists raised the banner of the indigenous church. Consequently the self-activity of the campesinos had to pass through two layers of mediation - or one of highly-integrated opposites - before it could assert itself in any way.

The land pressure was increased yet further in 1978 when Lopez Portillo announced the creation of the Montes Azul Biosphere - 38,000 hectares in the heart of the Lacandon. Forty communities and ejidos were removed from this UN-protected ecosystem. The frequent land occupations by campesino groups, sometimes led by the CIOAC (Independent Central of Agricultural Workers and Campesinos, Communist Party dominated and still influential today), were usually met with military expulsion. In 1980 the army massacred fifty Tojolabal Indians who had occupied a finca (large farm) forty miles from Comitan. This was the pattern for the '80s: the army and the police combining with the Guardias Blancas to suppress land takeovers and murder peasant leaders.

New patterns of accumulation

If the 1970s saw an upsurge in class struggle, it also saw the arrival of new national and international patterns of accumulation. The farmers and ranchers nowadays sit more or less uncomfortably with the new industries that wish to exploit Chiapas's abundant natural wealth, and which are often diametrically opposed to their interests. New dams were built in this period to provide electricity for petrochemical plants in Tabasco and Veracruz: Chiapas is Mexico's largest producer of hydroelectricity, though half of its homes have no power. Dam construction has provided sporadic employment for some parts of the indigenous population, while others have had to abandon their villages to rising flood waters. Further dam construction is planned, much of it targeted at the Zapatista stronghold of Las Canadas (the Canyons), a region of Los Altos.

The importance of hydroelectricity pales in comparison with the discovery of oil, however. The deposits in the north-east of the state are part of the Gulf of Mexico field that produces 81% of Mexico's crude export. But new deposits have also been found in the east, just north of the Guatemalan border (the so-called Ocosingo field), bang in the middle of Zapatista territory. Most of this new oil is not yet being pumped, but exploratory wells have been drilled both by PEMEX, the national oil company, and international oil interests. This sort of hit-and-miss drilling requires a lot of land; consequently the latifundistas and rancheros come into conflict with the international capital that views them as backward. A less developed industry, but potentially of great importance to the region, is biotechnology. Chiapas's diverse ecosystems are a paradise for those seeking to launch a new round of accumulation based on patented genetic technology. Already several companies have begun bio-prospecting in the state. But this is an exploitation that will be based on the preservation of the jungles, rather than their destruction.

We can see a new pattern of accumulation developing in Chiapas. Previously a backwater of non-innovatory local capital, the region has now acquired a strategic importance to sections of both national and international capital. However, the contradiction is not so much between new modes of accumulation and old, although tensions certainly exist, as some have argued:[17] a farmer may need to grab more land to keep his agribusiness growing, but he would surely be more than happy to hand over a drilling concession for a generous fee. Rather the contradiction is between a local and international capital that is compelled to make ever more of Chiapas barren in order to accumulate and international capital in the form of biotech multinationals who need to preserve the ecosystem.[18] Oil is predictably winning and the natural resources of Chiapas are being slowly eroded.

What is important is that for the local rancheros and latifundistas (who need only relatively small amounts of labour-power), for the oil companies and biotech corporations, the indigenous population of eastern Chiapas is now, almost absolutely, surplus to requirements. Those who were displaced from the west now discover it would be better not to have existed at all. This absolute neglect is reflected in the levels of alcoholism in many Indian communities, and the malnutrition and high infant mortality in the eastern highlands. The Mexican obsession with death, a cultural inheritance from ancient times and which was given new themes and images by the introduction of grim Catholic culture, has been renewed by the Zapatistas' frequent references to mortality.

The sparks of rebellion

The specific causes of the armed uprising of the Chiapan Indians are easy enough to trace. While the indigenous population had been excluded from the PRI welfare state, aside from a layer of PRIista caciques, they had benefited from the subsidies that had traditionally supported Mexican agriculture. From 1988, these subsidies and protections were reduced, dismantled or abolished by the new neoliberal PRI. So, for example, 1989 saw the abolition of INMECAFE, the state agency designed to purchase and set coffee prices, a crucial crop for the Indian ejidos. Floated on the world market, the price of coffee fell like a stone.[19] Wider structural changes also occurred in the name of opening Mexico up to the free market. 1992 saw the infamous amendment of Article 27 of the Constitution. Previously sacred truths were being questioned by the PRI: the amended Article now permitted the sale of communal lands to anyone who wanted to buy from anyone who could be persuaded (or forced) to sell. The countryside had been opened up to competition, strengthening the hand of the finca-owners and international capital. On top of this, NAFTA, which Salinas saw as his crowning achievement, would soon come into play. How would the Indians' small corn or coffee crops compete with modern US agribusiness? The answer was that they wouldn't.

In tandem with these factors which pointed to further immiseration, the campesinos of eastern Chiapas had not experienced a reduction in the state-sponsored repression that had been directed against them. The sigh of relief that had accompanied the end of General Castellanos's murderous governorship of the state (1982-88) quickly became a groan when his successor, Patrocinio Gonzalez began jailing peasant leaders and bumping off journalists The Guardias Blancas were roaming the countryside with impunity and the new forestry police were shooting at anyone they caught chopping down trees. Under these extreme circumstances, traditional independent peasant organisations such as CIOAC and the Association of Regional Independent Campesinos (ARIC), which had been set up by Maoists in the '70s were unable to hold their members. The stable cyclical world of the Indian village was being consumed by crisis. Colombus Day, October 1992 saw ten thousand indigenous marching through the streets of San Cristobal. Later they tore down the statue of local conquistadore Diego de Mazariegos. Many in the demonstration were already Zapatistas. The Indians of Los Altos, Las Canadas and La Selva were flooding into the ranks of the EZLN. But where had the EZ come from? And who exactly was organising it?

Formation of the EZLN[20]

The egalitarian nature of indigenous communal life has been widely overstated. Desperate to dispel the dead weight of Leninism, many have talked up the importance of Indian tradition. Isolated, impoverished, long distorted by caciques, by corrupt PRIistas, hotbeds of patriarchy and alcohol-fuelled domestic violence, the indigenous communal life is considerably less than perfect. But there is a moment of truth: communal ejidos are the norm, important decisions are chewed over for hours on end by everyone, plays and poetry keep the history of resistance alive. What is new about the Zapatista communities is the energetic manner in which they have become political and overcome some of the worst aspects of village tradition. Importantly this has enabled the Zapatistas to move beyond the crippling localism that has been characteristic of other peasant struggles.

As we have already explained, one mediation the campesinos have gone through (and still go through) enroute to becoming Zapatistas, is the influence of the Catholic church and liberation theology in particular. Whether critical or celebratory, accounts of the Zapatistas have generally neglected this reactionary influence on the development of the class struggle in Chiapas. The extent to which the autonomous communities are infected with religious sentiment is not always appreciated. Every village has a church, usually the most skilfully constructed building in the community, and which is sometimes the only place for miles that has electricity, while the Zapatistas themselves invariably live in ill-lit shacks. There is a high interpenetration of religion and politics: the lay catechist who preaches is often the local EZLN rep, and Masses have a tendency to dissolve into long political meetings - or the other way around. It would be fair to say that while liberation theology has contributed to the combativity of the Chiapan Indians it has also played its part in retarding the theoretical efforts of the Zapatista struggle.

The phenomenon has been present in Chiapas in a concentrated form since at least 1974, when Samuel Ruiz (the 'Red Bishop', a figure much hated by the latifundistas and rancheros) organised a 'Congress of Indian Peoples' in San Cristobal. Shocked into action by the anger displayed at the Congress, Ruiz not only stepped up the church's militant crusading in the villages, he also, as we have seen, invited Maoist cadre into the area. The mid- to late-1970s witnessed a period of co-operation between the party of the church and the church of the party. In fact the 1970s saw the highpoint of Catholicism's flirtation with Marxism. Confronted with military dictatorships across almost the whole of Latin America, many Catholics believed, for example that: 'The class struggle is a fact and neutrality in the question is not possible' or 'To participate in the class struggle...leads to a classless society without owners or dispossessed, without oppressor and oppressed.'[21]Liberation theology even had its own Che - the body of Camillo Torres, Colombian priest-turned-guerilla fighter.

The contradictions abound: believing in a classless society, catechists are unable to break with a church whose very essence is hierarchy and authority. (In its turn Rome is keen to keep them on side - in an excommunicated liberation theology it perceives the possibility of its own dissolution.) By continually encouraging the revolt of 'the poor' in the city and the country, yet unable to break through the miasma of Catholicism, the liberation theologists actively impede the development of the conscious category of proletariat, whose realisation and self-abolition is the only real solution to the impoverishment of their flock.

By the mid-1980s, with swathes of Latin America undergoing a transition to democracy, notably in Brazil, the highpoint of radical liberation theology was over. The Sandinista defeat in 1990 and the end of the civil war in El Salvador further moderated the influence of Marxism. In Chiapas, however, with the situation in the highlands deteriorating, the liberation theologists wielded greater infuence than ever before. As Jacques Camatte says, 'Religion allows a human demonstration against capital because God is a human product (i.e. something that appears to exist outside the prevailing mode of production). Thanks to him, man can still save his being from the evil embrace of capital.'[22] When Marcos says 'We want liberation - but not the theology', we should not be fooled. The Zapatistas are as devout a lot as one is ever likely to meet.

However, it was not just that the Church was acting as a political force - it was also acting as a conduit for Mexican leftists who could not otherwise gain access to the Indians of Chiapas. Ruiz found these leftists useful in the organising work he had committed his diocese to. In the 1970s, the arrangement was that the priests would handle pastoral work while the Maoists handled the political organising. This backfired on him badly in 1980 when Linea Proletaria mounted a coup and replaced the catechist leaders in the key peasant unions.

It took two years for Ruiz and his priests to regain the initiative. He turned to another group of leftists to help him - but unbeknown to him this group was an advance party of the Che Guevara-inspired Fuerzas de Nacional Liberacion (Forces of National Liberation, FLN). By the time Linea Proletaria was leaving Chiapas in 1983, the FLN, taking advantage of its successes in organising with the Church, was upping its activity significantly. The FLN High Command had secretly visited the canyons, with a view to developing an army which they already had a name for - the EZLN. With them came a young captain, Marcos.

From 1991 the FLN made real progress in recruiting beyond its core cadre of Indian militants. While they had may have followed the foco model of the Cuba experience, which emphasises the military struggle over the social, they recognised the need to participate in grassroots organisations - a lesson they may have learnt from the innovative left-Maoist aspects of Linea Proletaria. However, they had avoided falling into a tendency that Linea Proletaria had succumbed to: drifting away from militant land occupations and battles with employers and towards co-operation with PRI agencies over credit lines, marketing facilities and productivity increases. The importance of differentiating between these strategies became more pronounced as the massive anti-poverty programme PRONASOL rolled into Chiapas in the early 1990s. With it rolled some of the old Linea Proletaria cadre, now part of Salinas's retinue. An alliance between the PRONASOL government workers and the Church, now long aware of the FLNs commitment to armed struggle, aimed to divert the Indians' anger into avenues of government recuperation. But with the economic situation for the Indians now so desperate, the FLN was able to outflank this move by creating a new militant body, the ANCIEZ, the Emiliano Zapata Independent National Peasant Alliance, an embryonic Zapatista army under whose banner the militant Indians began the work of reorganising their communities. They even managed to get some PRONASOL funds on the sly for weapons.

All these elements - the FLN, the priests, the communal Indian traditions, each with their own internal contradictions, were lenses through which the coming-into-being of the EZLN was focused. The necessary first step of this militant reorganisation was the suppression within the communities of anti-Zapatista elements, usually caciques out to enrich themselves or PRIistas who could act as levers of coercion or as spies. This process must have developed in quite different ways according to the prevailing conditions. In some places there was a blanket conversion to Zapatismo and the villagers could afford to be relatively open, at least with each other, about their organisation. Individual PRIistas would be easy to isolate and exclude. Other villages might have an even mix of Zapatistas and PRIistas, or complete PRI dominance. In the latter case many rebellious campesinos were simply forced out and constructed a community elsewhere. Even today when large chunks of Chiapas are controlled by the EZLN, one can often find a Zapatista village next to a PRI village, with all the suspicion and antagonism that that implies. The PRI web is torn but far from brushed away: the fear of informers means that on the margins of EZLN territory, clandestinity is still very much the name of the game. The expulsion where possible of PRIistas opened up a space for the Zapatistas, a space where a process of rebuilding could begin. Simultaneous to the clandestine reconstitution of the villages the insurgent army began to coalesce in the highlands around 1992-93.

Until September 1993, Marcos and the Indian cadres were following orders from the High Command of the FLN in Mexico City, though he has since made every effort to hide it. In that month, realizing the FLN units in other Mexican states were barely existent, let alone able to lead an armed revolution, he refused their request to send finances out of Chiapas. It seems to be at this time that the ideological break with the FLN occurred, though it was not fully confirmed until the failure of the January 1994 uprising. The Clandestine Committee for Indigenous Revolution (CCRI) which had been created in January 1993 and which was made up of veteran Indian cadre now pushed for war. However, on this one crucial point, the village assemblies found consensus impossible. According to Womack: '[The] assemblies groaned for consensus for the armed way, but it would not come... In the Zapatista canyons the majority ruled...where communities voted for war, the EZLN tolerated no dissent or pacifism: the minorities had to leave.'[23]

From its FLN origins, then, we know that the army itself could be a sufficient form for the hierarchical organisation of the struggle. A political cadre could operate within the army to transmit the line of the organisation and its leadership to both combatants and non-combatants. Leninism, as a 'hierarchic organisation of ideology' (Debord), does not require an obvious party form; it is enough that a cadre of militants exist with a leadership - perhaps a hidden leadership - giving them political direction. We know that the FLN grew in Chiapas by recruiting and training an Indian cadre who then played a key role in the Zapatista decision to go to war. But this was not a vanguard 'parachuted in from the outside'. Apart from Marcos, and possibly a few others, it was composed of Indians who joined because it seemed to meet their needs. Specifically, it unified Indians of different languages and allowed them to act collectively against their exploiters.

But if the EZLN has at its origin the hierarchy and mediation that is inherent in the Che Guevara version of Leninism, there is no doubt that the political certainties that accompanied this model were destroyed following the failure of January 1994. The rupture that took place between September 1993 and February 1994 meant the EZLN and the cadre form was thrown into crisis. On the one hand the EZLN had clearly failed in their attempt to launch a credible military offensive, and had become besieged and isolated. Yet on the other hand, the outpouring of public support for the Zapatistas must have caused the CCRI-GC (General Command) and the Indian cadres to re-examine their ideas. Out of this crisis came a commitment to a vague form of left reformism, utilising ideas such as civil society. Desperate to survive, the EZLN has usually pitched for the lowest, and least controversial, common denominator in its organising efforts and communiques - anti-PRI. However, the other long-term effect of the uprising and its failure has been a high level of confusion and disorientation. Periodically the organisation has been able to unite around certain initiatives, such as the Encuentros. Yet given the extremely difficult conditions they live under, the Zapatistas have displayed a tremendous level of courage and initiative. It is the self-activity of the Indians, above all else, that defines this struggle.

Zapatista organisation

The scale of the uprising is the first thing that strikes the visitor to eastern Chiapas. There are over 1,100 rebel communities, each with 300-400 people, usually young. These villages, some of which have been built since 1994, are federated into thirty-two autonomous municipalities. The civil decision-making process is fluid: local decisions are made locally, important policy or project decisions made on a wider, but not always municipal, level. Municipally, delegates from each village come together in the assembly halls that are almost as common as churches. These meetings are extremely long-winded by European standards, sometimes going on for two or three days until something like consensus is reached. This ability to reach consensus is aided by the vitality of the traditional decision-making process and which recognises the pressing demands of life under siege. The remoteness of the Indians' lives from regular wage labour, and the communal nature of farming which in any case is labour-intensive only seasonally, enables the Zapatistas to carve out large portions of time for meetings and organising.

The civil level is completed by the five Aguascalientes which are dotted around Zapatista territory. Named after the original Aguascalientes (where the CND was held) which was destroyed by the Mexican army in 1995, in turn named after the Aguascalientes Military Convention of 1914, these cultural centres are a conglomeration of schoolhouses, assembly halls, metalworking shops, sleeping quarters, storage huts, etc. It is to the Aguascalientes that the Zapatistas come for their most important political meetings, dances, and endless basketball tournaments. They have also been used at various times as EZLN barracks.

The EZLN encampments, being obvious targets, are away from the communities, hidden from the constant overflight of army helicopters or air force bombers. The local EZLN detachments send representatives to the various CCRIs, which in turn sends delegates to the CCRI General Command, which consists of around 70-80 members, and is based in the Lacandon area surrounding the Aguascalientes of La Realidad.

The hierarchy that exists in the EZ is almost certainly part of the legacy the FLN has left the Indians. Commandante, Subcommandante, Major, Captain: the chain of command appears to reproduce that of the state's armed wing perfectly. Naturally, there will have been tendencies within the CCRI-GC that both ossify and loosen command, but a relaxation could be more likely in recent years as the EZLN has been militarily quiet since its initial flurry of activity. With the indigenous war on hold, work in the communities has taken precedence, and the damage militarisation can do to a social movement reduced. The EZ, however, is still the arena where the young wish to prove themselves. Since 1994 a new generation of combatientes (EZ soldiers) has come of age, and it would be interesting to know how many have made it into the CCRI-GC - or whether they now dominate it. Unfortunately this information is not available to us.

One further aspect that differentiates the EZ from an army of the state, aside from its relatively informal command structure, is the apparent absence of both punishment and insubordination. Joining up is not compulsory, though all seventeen year-old men and women are encouraged to participate. Many seem to want to join the militias earlier. The Zapatista army has after all come ultimately from the material needs and insurrectionary desire of the Chiapan Indians. As such becoming a combatiente is seen to be not only in an Indian's self interest, it is also an escape from agricultural drudgery and early marriage into a world of excitement and possibility. The EZ may not appear as a burden to the young, rather to join it could be to embark upon a process of individual and communal self-expression. If we wish to believe Marcos, and some may not, it is also a space for limited, but hitherto unthinkable, sexual experimentation, free from the judgmental gaze of the village elders.

The relationship of the EZLN to the autonomous communities after 1994 appears to be characterised by the slogans: 'Commanding obeying' and 'Everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves'. The former is really nothing more than an indigenous take on the practice of recallable delegates. As such it follows firmly in the traditions of soviets and workers' councils - though of course it is double-edged: if the commanders obey, they also command. The latter slogan is an assurance that that the EZLN, or the CCRI-GC, will not enrich itself at the expense of the communities, nor will it transform itself into a new layer of caciquismo. The villages are not the bases of support for the guerrilla army, as was the case in neighbouring Guatemala, rather the EZLN appears to be the base of support for the self-organised village. Because there are not nearly enough resources to go around, any material enrichment on the part of the EZ, or sections of the EZ, would instantly raise suspicions of PRI influence. But in fact the Zapatista army is not saying 'we will take only that share to which we are entitled', they are saying 'we will take less than our share.' In impoverished eastern Chiapas this amounts to a little more than posturing. The same obsession with death we noted earlier also leads into a language of sacrifice.

The dialectic of 'commanding obeying' can best be seen at work in the devising and implementation of the various Revolutionary Laws of the EZLN. The Laws themselves are mired in leftist bourgeois language - 'The Rights and Obligations of the Peoples in Struggle', 'The Rights and Obligations of the Revolutionary Armed Forces' - and often in reformist content, such as the Revolutionary Agrarian Law, which we shall look at later. Once again we see the influence of the structures of Marxism-Leninism. But they represent also a sophisticated attempt by the campesinos to begin solving their own problems. The army, being everywhere, was the only body that could implement their new world with any degree of consistency.[24] The Laws, devised after endless debate and discussion, in themselves (i.e. aside from their content) are an attempt by the Indians to endow their struggle with a sense of permanence, a way of saying 'we are not going back.' Naturally they are mediations, but they are at least mediations which have enabled the Zapatista struggle to move beyond visceral class antagonism into self-organisation - a coherence not seen in the Mexican countryside since the days of the Ayala Plan.

Any description of Zapatista organisation must include an account of the effect of the uprising on the status of indigenous women. Before Zapatismo the conditions women lived in were dreadful: sexual abuse was rife through rape or early forced marriage, domestic violence was high, giving birth to large families ruined a woman's body and gave them a heavy responsibility for social reproduction through household chores. Moreover they were expected to reduce their food intake so that the husband and children could eat sufficiently, though even this was unable to staunch the high rates of infant mortality. In short they were virtual slaves in their own villages.

The uprising has not liberated them, as it has not liberated any other Indian, from a world of want. What it has done is given them an opportunity to break beyond the atomisation of the village to form a developing unity based on the rich variety of their needs. The space for women's organisation has not opened up because of the rebellion, instead the women's demands have been imposed on the men in a collective and conscious attempt to expand the sphere of their own autonomy. This has only added to diversity of Zapatismo.

Some have argued that 'women's integration into military structures remains the surest way to defuse the subversive potential of their choice to break with the past.'[25] We would disagree. The women see their subversive potential not as women, but as Zapatista women. That entails expanding their autonomy both within the village (for example, in co-ops of various kinds) and embarking on a project of solidarity with the men in the army. They are both against and with the men; primarily they are for themselves, a project which they see as being realised in the organic and relatively informal structures of the EZLN. And in response to the state's militarisation of Chiapas they have expressed themselves through simultaneously taking up arms and developing their own quasi-military structures. Armed with staffs that are almost as tall as themselves, they have trained themselves to fight police incursions into their municipalities, often with babies on their backs. All this is done with high efficiency and usually masked up, faces covered with the red palliacates that are a Zapatista emblem.

Aside from taking up arms, perhaps the single most subversive act they have undertaken is the banning of alcohol, which is used by the Chiapan landowners and ranchers as an out-and-out weapon of social control. Alcohol sales on tick tend to cause unpayable debt through the employer's shop, and the community in its alienation and powerlessness turns in on itself through domestic violence. The effect in Indian communities has been devastating, similar to that experienced on the reservations of North America. With the landowners gone, the indigenous women immediately enforced a ban that is universal in Zapatista territory. Many villages have a tiny one-person jail or secure hut where the occasional drunkard returning from Ocosingo or Altamirano can be imprisoned for a night or so. The ban, developed from the immediate concerns of the women, also forced the men into a new respect which in turn opened the way for further self-defined projects - for example organising women's marches against state militarisation in the tourist town of San Cristobal.

The women's situation is not developing all one way. Pregnant combatientes must return to their villages where they may be subject to isolation, although the father of the child must accompany her; those who have never left will almost always be illiterate, unable to speak any Spanish, and continue to bear the burden of childcare. In many villages women are still excluded from meetings. Nevertheless the tendency is towards free determination as part of the developing social whole, towards rebelde mujeres (rebel women) rather than subservient ones.

Lastly, the military situation in Chiapas demands a brief mention. The federated Zapatista areas are surrounded and interpenetrated with hundreds of army checkpoints and bases. The militarisation is immense: 70,000 troops, one third of the entire Mexican army, armed with the best weapons American anti-narco money can buy. PRI- and landowner-sponsored paramilitaries, of which there are seven different varieties roam the countryside, ratcheting up the tension. This patchwork of conflict is further confused by the waves of refugees that have occasionally been created by army occupations of Zapatista municipalities, or those with EZ sympathies who have been expelled from PRI villages. In Chiapas the armed wing of capital is everywhere visible.

Having described the basic outline of the Zapatista set-up, we shall now turn to the ideas of the uprising. In attempting to move beyond the cheerleading or the hostility this social movement has prompted, we shall deal with, in turn, the ideas of the 'ultra-left' and the academic autonomists. The 'ultra-left' tend to see the Zapatista as a desperate guerrilla fighter manipulated by hidden leaders; the academics see the Indian reasserting his or her labour against predatory global capital. These views of Zapatismo as a simple, monolithic body can result in the suppression of contradiction. But the uprising is a living, evolving thing, within and against capital, and as such is riven with contradiction. Before we go any further we must examine the specific class character of the rebel Indian, from where some of these contradictions arise.

The class position of the Zapatista Indian

The class position of the Zapatista Indian is, as we shall argue, more peasant than proletarian. Before substantiating this point, we must step back briefly and derive an understanding of the nature and function of the peasantry. Traditional Marxism explains the peasantry with the same analytical tools it uses to explain class polarisation in urban societies. It is perfectly suited to the rapid movement and social change that takes place in cities during industrialisation, but it can lead some to a simplistic idea of class relations in the countryside, where many pre-capitalist forms survive and where stability rather than change can be the defining ethos. Just as capitalism in the cities bases itself on constantly revolutionising the means of production, some orthodox Marxists see in the countryside a mirrored process whereby greater numbers of peasants are excluded from the land, while a much smaller number manage to transform themselves into professional farmers with larger landholdings. With this programmatic approach it is easy to believe in the possibility of stirring up class war within the village itself. Thus for Lenin it was simply a matter of encouraging the poor peasants to rebel against the rich peasants. These poor peasants, increasingly separated from the means of production, would discover their natural allies in the proletariat, while the affluent peasants with access to land and market networks would side with the bourgeoisie. The urban formula of class struggle was simply transposed onto the countryside.

There is, of course, truth in this analysis. Capitalism, to the extent to which it can penetrate, and thereby alter, traditional peasant society, does create class polarisation. But the Soviet experience of War Communism, NEP and particularly collectivisation, shows not an increasingly class-ridden and socially volatile peasant community; instead it shows the high level of internal stability and resistance to outside influence: not so much an example of poor peasant and political commissar vs. rich peasant, as rich and poor peasant vs. political commissar.

The problem with the orthodoxy is that it overestimates the ability of capital to break down traditional peasant structures. The process of agricultural revolution may have happened in western Europe and north America, but in many parts of the world, such as Mexico, the peasant village has remained stubbornly impervious to capitalist development. So while agribusiness is characterised by wage-labour and new farming techniques, peasant production has at its heart unspecialised production for consumption, family labour, an absence of accounting, etc. In place of the relentless drive for profit, peasant life is one of isolation and immutability where births, marriages and the seasons hold more importance than crop yield or rational business planning.

The political implications of this conservative stability are twofold. The first is that peasant uprisings are almost always a reaction to an external crisis which threatens the peace of the village, rather than as a result of internal class antagonisms. The many crises in the history of the Mexican campesino has meant this class has been an especially combative one: the sudden arrival of primitive accumulation (the Conquest), the genocide by sword and disease, the rule from Spain, the violent expansion of the latifundias under the Porfiriato are all examples. The second implication is that within the peasant uprising the binding aspect of tradition enables small private farmers and those with communal landholdings (though the difference is not always clear cut: one can merge into the other at different times of the year or at times of family change) to live happily together in revolt - the Ayala Plan is a case in point. The principal point of attack which the orthodoxy identifies is often the most resistant to change.

What, then, is the nature of the class position of the Zapatista Indian today? We described earlier the uneven development of capitalism in Chiapas. The Indians have experience of wage-labour that might include: working on ranches, seasonal work on a finca (where an employer's shop system might operate, or debt-peonage be dominant), or fully-integrated wage-labour on dam construction, or at the oil operations of the north-east. All this work is either seasonal or temporary - when it is over the campesino must return to the village to scratch out a living from the soil. For men, just about the only form of permanent work is being employed by the repressive arms of the PRI or the landowners. For the women, handicrafts (including Zapatista dolls) to sell in the markets of San Cristobal or outside Mayan ruins is a possible form of income. This is a strictly peasant activity: their stall is a patch of ground and the level of poverty offsets any petty-bourgeois trade content this activity might contain. Overall the Indian women have never been integrated into the wage-labour system, though they may have some contact with the commodity economy, and the men have only been partly and temporarily integrated. They represent a section of the population which capital has not fully proletarianised because it has no need of their labour-power. In fact, as we mentioned earlier, it would be better for capital if these people did not exist at all.

Neither has their limited contact with the wages system been a definitive experience for the Chiapanecos. On the contrary they have retreated further into the margins of Mexican geography in their attempt to preserve their traditional communities. Their productive lives are determined by the land and the consumption needs of their family and village; their social lives by the traditions of the village; their thinking is generally social rather than economic - they are part of the 'different world' of the peasant. They have been unable to avoid wage-labour altogether - its influence has been important to the Zapatistas' ability to look beyond their immediate locality. But the overall class position of the Zapatista, his or her culture and beliefs, is that of the peasant. We could perhaps best define this class location as that of a semi-proletarian peasantry. Indeed one could argue that the uprising itself has, with its obsession for Mayan tradition, reinforced the peasant aspect over the proletarian.

It is only with this category of semi-proletarian peasant that we can understand the contradictions at the heart of the individual Zapatista and the practice of the EZLN itself. Guerrilla fighter or Mayan Indian? Communal farmer or politico? Both and neither. The 'ultra-left' groups, mistaking the Zapatistas for proles, condemn them for falling into the traps of twentieth century working class insurrection. The academics also mistake them for fully-integrated wage-slaves, and therefore representative of a new recomposition of labour against 'neoliberalism'. But the Chiapan Indians are not central to the expansion of capital; they are extremely marginal to it. Consequently they are not in an advantageous position to develop a critique of capital. Their only possibility is to reassert human community over a system that would rather see them dead.

The 'ultra-left'[26]

Mao and Marcos

Sylvie Deneuve and Charles Reeve's article 'Behind the Balaclavas of south-east Mexico' is without doubt the most hostile reaction to the Indian uprising in Chiapas. Reacting against the romanticisation of the Zapatistas, they wish to assert the proletarian aspects of the struggle over the more important peasant and Indian aspects which we have already examined. They perceive in the rebellion and the forms it has taken nothing more than one further example of deadening Leninism grafting its structures onto autonomous class struggle. Oscillating between contempt for the Indians' traditional subservience and an ungrounded belief in their immanent ability to launch into an unmediated orbit of pure revolution, Deneuve and Reeve give a schematic account of how they believe the class struggle in Chiapas has developed and been derailed. For them, the strong base assemblies of the Zapatista municipalities merely serve to protect those leaders who 'must never be seen': 'the Zapatista army is...only one part of The Organisation - it is its visible part.'

They account for the lack of an obvious Party line and the absen