{"id":1250,"date":"2014-01-27T09:45:20","date_gmt":"2014-01-27T09:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/activistmedia\/?p=1250"},"modified":"2020-04-22T09:14:20","modified_gmt":"2020-04-22T09:14:20","slug":"the-revolutionary-resonance-of-praxis-zapatismo-as-public-pedagogy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/activistmedia\/2014\/01\/the-revolutionary-resonance-of-praxis-zapatismo-as-public-pedagogy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Revolutionary Resonance of Praxis: Zapatismo as Public Pedagogy"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Anderson is a Ph.D student in Mass Communications and Media Arts at the Southern Illinois University Carbondale<\/a>. <\/em>His interests include social movements, alternative media, Amy Goodman, critical theory, prefigurative politics, horizontalidad, political economy and praxis. This week, James explores the practices of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. <\/i><\/p>\n

A little over 20 years ago, at the dawn of the New Year in 1994, when the Ej\u00e9rcito Zapatista de Liberaci\u00f3n Nacional <\/strong>(the Zapatista National Liberation Army; EZLN) of Chiapas, Mexico, yelled \u201c\u00a1Ya Basta!<\/i> (Enough!) in response to the ceaseless capital accumulation wrought by the 500-year-old capitalist world economy.<\/p>\n

The armed conflict in January 1994 between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government lasted 12 days. After fighting stopped, the EZLN engaged in dialogue, entering into the San Andr\u00e9s Accords in 1996, which the government promptly failed to uphold, prompting the Zapatistas to leave negotiations.<\/p>\n

Operating \u201cfrom below and to the left,\u201d where the heart resides, they have since focused on strengthening autonomy, deepening direct democracy and developing what Kara Zugman-Dellacioppa calls<\/a> a \u201ctranscultural activist network\u201d (TCAN).<\/p>\n

On the other hand, drawing partially on his experience with the Zapatistas, John Holloway, argues that to \u201cCrack Capitalism<\/a>\u201d we should avoid valorizing activist efforts. \u201cIn other words, social change is not produced by activists, however important activism may (or may not) be in the process,\u201d he wrote. It\u2019s necessary, he insists, to \u201clook beyond activism, then, to the millions and millions of refusals and other-doings,\u201d the \u201cbarely visible transformations of the daily activities of millions of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps it is so. Yet, Leonidas Oikonomakis and J\u00e9r\u00f4me E. Roos go in-against-and-beyond the proposition above by drawing on Holloway\u2019s own conception of resonance<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Zapatismo, the philosophy and praxis of Zapatistas, is not a process of linear diffusion, they explained<\/a>. It is, rather, resonance of Real Democracy, or, \u201cactivation of a latent potential for mobilization,\u201d a simultaneous negation of the neoliberal death drive. It is Eros to the Thanatos that would extinguish any affective politics not mediated by markets, subordinate relationships to commodity exchange or legitimate hierarchical coercion.<\/p>\n

This desire overflows from the hegemony of concepts that keep reproducing \u201ccapital, the value, which can perform its own valorization process,\u201d Karl Marx expounded<\/a> more than a century ago, \u201can animated monster which begins to \u2018work\u2019, \u2018as if its body were by love possessed.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In contrast, Zapatismo resonated recently, Oikonomakis and Roos argued, through the Spanish indignados<\/i> in Puerta del Sol, the Greek aganaktismenoi<\/i> in Syntagma Square and Occupy Wall Street in New York\u2019s Zuccotti Park.<\/p>\n

The resonance made manifest in the effervescence of anarchist-socialist social movements reflects a completely ordinary desire, shared by millions, to be sure. No self-serving vanguard need apply, as Holloway suggested.<\/p>\n

Immanent human capacity for horizontalidad<\/a> and collective self-organization exists, if often in the form of being denied, Holloway has pointed out. He has downplayed other human capacities, however.<\/p>\n

\u201cHuman activity is theory and practice; it is reflection and action,\u201d wrote Paulo Freire, the late Brazilian philosopher when articulating a \u201cPedagogy of the Oppressed<\/a>.\u201d Praxis cannot \u201cbe reduced to either verbalism or activism,\u201d and it would indeed be \u201ca false premise to believe that activism (which is not true action) is the road to revolution.\u00a0 People will be truly critical if they live the plenitude of praxis.\u201d<\/p>\n

We must actualize our potentials. We must. This requires reflection and action. The Zapatista\u2019s poetics of spontaneity along with their mandar obedeciendo<\/i> \u2013 \u201cto rule by obeying\u201d maxim, intimates praxis, perforce action and reflection. That is what resonates.<\/p>\n

It is not mindless activism, nor is it devoid of thought. Oikonomakis and Roos claim the broad Real Democracy movement \u201cconsciously<\/i> prefigured the creation of a different<\/i> democratic model, one characterized by popular assemblies, leaderless self-management and consensus-based decision making.\u201d<\/p>\n

Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista\u2019s public spokesperson, consciously uses words to traverse space and time. This occurs through neo-Zapatista new media networks, but also via the resonant quality of what he says and writes. He creates a mirror in which we see our interconnected selves and shared struggles. Such mirrored communication implores conscious reflection \u2013 and action.<\/p>\n

The Zapatista adage of caminando preguntamos<\/i>, or \u201cwalking, we ask questions,\u201d suggests a particular form of praxis. During the escuelita<\/a><\/i>, conducted in August 2013, more than 1,500 activists from all over the globe were invited to learn from and with indigenous in Chiapas. Like the Chiapas-95 email listserv and website<\/a> run by activist Harry Cleaver in the years immediately following the 1994 rebellion, which provided an outlet for Zapatista communiqu\u00e9s and a forum for discussion, the contemporary Occupy-affiliated Zapatista listserv and website<\/a> conveyed lessons learned at the Little School.<\/p>\n

Students learned that for Zapatistas, \u201cdemocracy is not about election season and candidates\u2019 campaigns,\u201d or about money. \u201cDemocracy is at any moment, at every level of our life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The salience of horizontal decision-making for the Zapatistas and for OWS is not always understood.<\/p>\n

David Harvey, author of \u201cRebel Cities<\/a>,\u201d claimed in an interview<\/a> that Occupy Wall Street operated as \u201ca vanguard movement,\u201d and that OWS was merely \u201ctalking to the 99 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Occupy had an in-built guard against vanguardism. The movement\u2019s prefigurative politics, while radical in relation to (neo)liberal capitalist democracy that denies most people a say in the major decisions affecting their lives, advanced assembly-style participatory democracy. Those ephemerally autonomous spaces for consensus building in Zuccotti and other encampments helped people recuperate their voice. It was not that the movement was \u201ctalking for the 99 percent,\u201d like Harvey would have it. OWS gave the 99 percent space to communicate and act.<\/p>\n

Like others echoing the ethos of Zapatismo, the vanguard label only applies insofar as it refers to autonomous collective action<\/i> and praxis<\/i> in-against-and-beyond the state-corporate nexus.<\/p>\n

This reverberation of resistance entails a process of critical pedagogy, rejection of hierarchy and attack on the class antagonisms that cut across capitalist society. Antagonisms are not new. The hegemony has been reinforced through generations of generated cultures of consent.<\/p>\n

Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, writing about egemonia<\/i> during Mussolini\u2019s reign, emphasized the importance of intellectuals for generating consent.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll men are intellectuals, one could therefore say,\u201d Gramsci wrote while incarcerated in fascist Italy, \u201cbut not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Importantly, Zapatismo does not deny difference. That means seeking \u201ca world where many worlds fit,\u201d as the Zapatistas put it. However, it also implies conscious recognition and rejection of extant relations of oppressive iniquities.<\/p>\n

Subcomandante Marcos asked a related, rhetorical question in \u201cThe Speed of Dreams<\/a>\u201d: \u201cIf the legal system, which sees the violent imposition of capital as being \u2018rational and human,\u2019 has judges, guards, police, and jails, then what are their equivalent in the culture of Mexico, in research and academia, in theoretical work, analysis, and in the debating of ideas?\u201d<\/p>\n

His answer? \u201cThe intellectuals from above, who say what is science and what is not, what is serious and what is not, what is debate and what is not, what is true and what is false. In sum, what is intelligent and what is not.\u201d He goes on to describe \u201cintellectuals in the middle,\u201d those \u201cin transit to above,\u201d who propagate an ideology of \u201cobjectivity\u201d despite the impossibility of a neutral public pedagogy.<\/p>\n

\u201cEducation never was, is not, and never can be neutral or indifferent in regard to the reproduction of the dominant ideology or the interrogation of it,\u201d Freire argued in \u201cPedagogy of Freedom<\/a>\u201d \u2013 a statement compounded by Gramsci\u2019s insight that \u201cevery relationship of hegemony is an educational one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mass media discourse \u2013 public pedagogy par excellence \u2013 remains, in the main, circumscribed within narrow, neoliberal bounds. Debate can rage over the best market-based approach to a problem, but seldom do media pundits problematize the hegemony of market-based approaches.<\/p>\n

Online communication challenges traditional gatekeepers, as the Zapatistas illustrated. Yet efforts persist to erode the rhizomatic nature of the Net, including: the ubiquity of personalized ads created by data-mining and new niche marketing techniques; broadband providers increasing authority to block or slow content and new decrees paving the way to pay-for-play fast lanes<\/a> that privilege capital-rich companies over everyone else.<\/p>\n

Incremental reconfiguration of the cyber-sphere into a slightly more interactive cable TV arrangement does not bode well. Because really, cable television kind of sucks.<\/p>\n

Transformation of other institutions, like University, pose similar problems. Opaque privatization through increased tuition and fees deepens divisions of class, disciplining indebted students and engendering a whole slew of \u201cd\u00e9class\u00e9 intellectuals,\u201d Chris Hedges explains<\/a> about those of us \u201cconversant in economics and political theory,\u201d who acknowledge disenfranchisement exacerbated by \u201cthe criminal class on Wall Street.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neoliberal education likewise valorizes the cultural capital of already affluent society, complicating the greater multitude\u2019s desire for socioeconomic democracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cGrowing up in a well-heeled suburban community, I absorbed our society\u2019s distaste for dissent long before I was old enough to grasp just what was being dismissed,\u201d wrote<\/a> Laura Gottesdeiner, who visited Zapatista communities in Chiapas for the second escuelita <\/i>earlier this year. \u201cMy understanding of so many people and concepts was tainted by this environment and the education that went with it,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

Gottesdeiner, a Yale alum, helps edit the popular Waging Nonviolence<\/a> \u201cpeople-powered\u201d news and analysis website. She recently authored, \u201cA Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home,\u201d after traveling around to get stories regarding the millions of Americans who have faced foreclosure since the 2007-09 global financial crisis.<\/p>\n

Not everyone has that privilege, certainly not those facing foreclosure and probably not the 71 percent of US college seniors who recently graduated with an average debt totaling $29,400, according to the Project on Student Debt<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So are we all on a horizontal plane when waging the interstitial revolution? Is the issue tantamount to debates over redressing unpaid labor through greater monetization and commodification that go nowhere?<\/p>\n

Or, is part of the incipient revolutionary transformation of the everyday finding a way to \u201cchange the world without taking power<\/a>\u201d while also consciously checking the power-over of privilege?<\/p>\n

Freire argued that it is the oppressed who \u201cfrom their stifled humanity,\u201d must wage \u201cthe struggle for a fuller humanity,\u201d because the oppressor \u201cis unable to lead the struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, the oppressor-oppressed distinction is ambiguous. Granted, the 85 people that, according to a January 2014 Oxfam report<\/a>, own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world\u2019s population, probably won\u2019t be picking up pitch forks anytime soon. Nor are elements of the \u201cDavos class<\/a>\u201d likely to question the prevailing common sense of incessant, deadening \u201cdead labour\u201d reproduction, the likely death knell for humanity.<\/p>\n

Likewise, efforts to end what Marx called capital\u2019s \u201cvampire thirst\u201d is not going to come from parts of the \u201cgreat vampire squid<\/a>\u201d at Goldman Sachs, who reportedly share such niceties on elevator rides<\/a> at\u00a0 work as, \u201cI wish I loved anything as much as I hate almost everything,\u201d in addition to earnest queries like, \u201cWhy would I marry? It\u2019s betting some chick half my net worth that I will love her forever?\u201d<\/p>\n

Such romantic sweet nothings notwithstanding, the bankster mentality and the banking-model of education are not the only things standing in the way of cracking capitalism.<\/p>\n

Perhaps \u201capathy is the biggest obstacle to change,\u201d Russell Brand argued in his now famous revolutionary proclamation<\/a>. \u201cWe can\u2019t alter the former [politics] without removing the latter [big business, capital].\u201d<\/p>\n

Brand and his supposed brand of \u201cbrocialism\u201d and \u201cmanarchism\u201d ignited flak not so much from the reactionary Right, but from the left<\/a>. Apropos alleged manarchy, purported \u201cblindness to privilege,\u201d \u201crefusal to acknowledge structural gender oppression,\u201d and inappropriate sexual innuendos are supposedly pervasive.<\/p>\n

Criticism from the \u201cPosh Left\u201d attacked Brand\u2019s privileged status too, as Kim Nicolini made clear<\/a>, but Brand was \u201cnot speaking from theory but from experience,\u201d as someone from lower class deprivation who \u201cknows the streets, the hopelessness, the drugs, the feeling of beaten down and not able to get out.\u201d She elaborated,<\/p>\n

No matter how far you climb on the cultural or economic ladder, if you come from the underclass, you never stop feeling your inferior position. With elitist Leftists slamming you at every turn, the anxiety is amplified to the Nth. Not only do you feel awkward and anxious occupying a strata where you don\u2019t feel you belong, but you get critiqued by people who think they know more about class than you do when you live with the burdens of your class background every day. Class manifests itself in a person\u2019s entire psycho-social biological being, and it is not simply erased because one becomes successful of the surface.<\/i><\/p>\n

Excoriating those who Marcos might call intellectuals from on high, she added:<\/p>\n

So what if Russell Brand likes women? So what if he fucks a new girl every week? Who\u2019s to say they\u2019re not enjoying it to? Sex happens. Focusing on Brand\u2019s sexual activity as a reason to dismiss his overall message about class is just a sign of how identity politics are part and parcel of the problem, not part of the solution<\/i>.<\/p>\n

In fact, collective pursuit of the Pleasure Principle, Holloway has argued, could thwart the alienating individualism characteristic of contemporary society\u2019s suffocating social synthesis.<\/p>\n

The drive against abstract labor and toward self-determination is one aspect of dignity part and parcel with Zapatismo. Another has to do with addressing power imbalances between men and women. This is what the Zapatista teachers from the autonomous municipalities told students on the second day<\/a> of the aforementioned Freedom School. Through the practice of horizontal democracy \u201cto reach equality between male comrades and female comrades,\u201d the Zapatista women said: \u201cOur organization taught us that we are worth it, that we can participate.\u201d<\/p>\n

What resonates is less counter-hegemonic \u201cmass self-communication\u201d constitutive of some \u201ccounter-power,\u201d as Manuel Castells described<\/a>, more public pedagogy of problematization \u2013 a participatory praxis of power-to. This love of democracy and democracy of love is \u201ctranscultural,\u201d like Zugman- Dellacioppa termed it. It has much to do with the dialectical transformation of dominant relations of production and relations among people.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the greatest flash of loving freedom throughout modernity, the comunismo libertario <\/i>society organized by anarcho-syndicalists like the Confederaci\u00f3n Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labour, or CNT), transformed both of the above for a few months in 1936 Spain.<\/p>\n

As the Spanish Civil War was getting underway, workers took collective control of the means of production on a decentralized level. Equally important, anarchist culture flourished. Popular anarchist weeklies like Revista Blanca<\/i> published incisive analysis critical of concentrated power, and also offered \u201cadvice on everything from vegetarian cooking to the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases,\u201d historian Jordi Getman-Eraso observed.<\/p>\n

Both Brand and the Zapatistas surely would\u2019ve approved.<\/p>\n

But the revolution was crushed by the war effort and thecombined forces of fascism, capitalism and centralized Communism: \u00a0For \u201cit was the Communists above all others who prevented revolution in Spain,\u201d George Orwell documented in his \u201cHomage to Catalonia<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we face facts,\u201d Orwell added at the time, \u201cwe must admit that the working class of the world has regarded the Spanish war with detachment,\u201d which we now assume had something to do with \u201cthe fact that the anti-Fascist press outside Spain,\u201d had \u201cmade it its special business to obscure\u201d how what \u201chappened in Spain was, in fact, not merely a civil war, but the beginning of a revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given its label as \u201cthe first postmodern revolution,\u201d we should consider whether the Zapatistas and the resonance of their dialogic praxis subvert that hegemonic bloc today.<\/p>\n

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argued that in the purported passage to a postmodern era of Empire<\/a>, the multitude of movements \u2013 or movements of the multitude \u2013 that emerged in the 1990s, including the Zapatistas, exemplify the \u201cmost urgent political paradoxes of our time: in our much celebrated age of communication, struggles have become all but incommunicable.\u201d These movements are marked by \u201ca very brief duration where they are born, burning out in a flash,\u201d the two wrote, noting the \u201cabsence of a recognition of a common enemy against which the struggles are directed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fast forward a few years, and Hardt and Negri reflected upon and expounded their theory<\/a>, calling the Zapatistas \u201cthe hinge\u201d between old forms of revolutionary struggle \u201cand the new model of biopolitical network struggles. \u2026 Communication is [now?] central to the Zapatista\u2019s notion of revolution, and they continually emphasize the need to create horizontal network organizations rather than vertical centralized structures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Subcomandante Marcos said that an independent media network would function \u201cnot only as a tool for our social movements but for our lives,\u201d to save history and \u201cshare it so it will not disappear.\u201d He later noted how the movement, from below and to the left, \u201cis creating itself,\u201d and \u201calso creating new realities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Communication as public pedagogy remains key to this creation of the multitude \u2013 not a constitutive power, but a critically negating praxis of reflection and problematization.<\/p>\n

Amy Goodman<\/a>, recipient of the \u201cGeorge Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language\u201d \u2013 and recipient of my unrequited love, reminds us of the resonance of \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d by recalling in her column<\/a> the late cyber-activist Aaron Swartz<\/a> who committed suicide last year under undue pressure from the Justice Department.<\/p>\n

Goodman quotes a statement Swartz made after he helped defeat legislation that would limit the democratizing potential of the Internet: \u201cIf we let them persuade us we didn\u2019t actually make a difference, if we start seeing it as someone else\u2019s responsibility to do this work … then next time they might just win. Let\u2019s not let that happen.\u201d As Swartz suggested, asserting dignity in the face of enormous difficulties compounded by gross inequalities is inseparable from humanizing praxis. Such public pedagogy reflects the responsibility for reflection and action of Zapatismo, which is the resonance of revolution today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Anderson is a Ph.D student in Mass Communications and Media Arts at the Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His interests… <\/p>\n

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