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Lia Pinheiro Barbosa is an activist and professor of sociology at the State University of Ceará (UECE) based in Fortaleza, Brazil. She has written extensively on the Zapatistas in Mexico and the MST (Landless Workers Movement) in Brazil. Peter Rosset is an academic, author and activist who resides in Chiapas, Mexico. He is a university professor at the Ecosur Advanced Studies Institute in Mexico, as well as at universities in Brazil and Thailand.

For issue #152 of The Internationalist, we interview Barbosa and Rosset on their book, Lessons from the Zapatistas: From Armed Insurgency to People’s Autonomy.

In this conversation with Tanya Singh, the authors discuss the Zapatista model of building grassroots autonomy and how it offers crucial lessons for a global Left struggling with ideological disorientation and the failures of "progressive" governments.

Tanya: Hello, Lia, Peter. Thank you for joining us today.

Lia, Peter: Thank you for having us!

Tanya: This book emerges from a deep, long-term engagement with the Zapatista communities. I'm interested in the project's journey, from its genesis as a necessary clarification of Zapatista thought for a Spanish-speaking audience, to its current life as a translated text for the English-speaking world. What, in your view, has changed in the global political landscape that translates this specific analysis not just interesting, but necessary now?

Lia:  This book project was inspired by several political, economic, and social phenomena: 1) the advancing mobilization, organization, and coordination processes of the Far Right and its social bases around the world, and a kind of loss of political and ideological direction by the Left, especially as its center of gravity has moved toward contesting the state through electoral processes; 2) the COVID-19 pandemic and the ethical, moral, and political abandonment of people by states and governments, reflected in high mortality rates, especially in countries governed by Far Right governments, such as the United States, India, and [then] Brazil; 3) the deepening plunder of territories by neo-extractivist transnational corporations aided by states, in addition to the spreading violence of organized crime.

In this scenario, we asked ourselves: how did organised communities confront the pandemic in their territories, whether urban or rural? What lessons emerge from these life-and-death situations in a context of extreme crisis caused by capitalism? Zapatismo has always been, and even more so during COVID-19, a fundamental reference point for placing autonomy at the centre of the debate and was a concrete path that allowed them to move from armed insurgency to sustaining a political project for the defence of life (human life and Nature) and territorial autonomy despite and against the State and its ‘democratic’ model, which does not usually lead to human emancipation. 

From there, we also reflected on what lessons Zapatismo could offer other struggles in defence of life, not only in the face of the pandemic, but in the confrontation with capitalism and its exploitation in their home territories. On the one hand, we saw countless grassroots organisations in different countries that stepped in to fill the social void left by the state and governments, activating a broad network ranging from self-managed health care measures, community kitchens, solidarity actions in the form of food donations, etc., to marches demanding vaccines and more effective action by public authorities. On the other hand, the word autonomy gradually emerged more explicitly among agrarian social movements, which, although historically positioned in a dispute for hegemony within the state, were also clear about concrete limits to their relationship with the same state.

When we received an invitation from the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) to write a book on Zapatismo to be published in the En Movimiento [“In Movement”] collection of short books about emblematic social movements, we saw it as an opportunity to highlight what we ourselves had learned from Zapatismo.  Above all, it would be an opportunity to engage in dialogue with other people’s movements and organisations on how to think about a horizon of autonomy in relation to genuine human emancipation. 

As we argue in the book, the date of the armed insurgency, January 1, 1994, was not a random date, but rather the day NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] came into force with all that it represented in terms of a neocolonial, imperialist, and capitalist offensive on the territories historically inhabited and built by indigenous peoples and peasants. The Zapatistas were very clear that NAFTA was a strategy for the appropriation and control of territory. Hence, it was not only an ethnic struggle, in other words, not just for the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples by the Mexican state. More than that, it was an open declaration of war that identified the reconfiguration of capitalism and the deepening of a dependent and subordinate integration into the global economy, which would not be exclusive to Mexico, but rather formulated for imperialism to retake control over Latin America and the Caribbean. In this sense, the Zapatistas were among the first to sound the alarm about globalisation.

For us, it would be important to highlight the theoretical and political lessons of Zapatismo, its conception of the state and power, the concretisation of autonomy in different areas, and what lessons can be incorporated from Zapatismo itself as a class-based, working peoples’ struggle, heir to a long history of internationalist popular struggles.

Peter: If a single issue can be said to characterise the contemporary debate inside rural social movements throughout Latin America, it is the question of the kind of relationships they should have or not have with the state. By way of a heuristic oversimplification, we can say that there are those (a majority of them, but decreasing) who believe that any significant advance in peasant production or quality of livelihood requires public policies, while there are those who believe that public policies impede any such advance (in the minority, but rapidly growing in number).

Thus, peasant organisations in Brazil are likely to feel that “you can’t plant without credit,” while the Zapatistas in Chiapas refuse public or private sector credit or any other form of funding or support from the state. Analogously, some believe that significant achievements can only be achieved by engaging with, and disputing, space and policies within the state, through mobilisation, protest and lobby directed at policy, legislative and/or constitutional reform, or through political parties, electoral candidacies or placing leaders in position within public administration. But others believe that real material and non-material improvements at the level of communities and territories can only be gained through a strong turn to peasant and indigenous forms of territorial autonomy. Arguments are often formulated along the lines of: the state is not coming to solve our problems because it is both a source of our problems, and a servant of our enemies in the private sector, so we will be better off keeping the state out of our communities and organise collectively to solve our problems and defend our land and territory ourselves.

This divergence in opinion is in great part due to the poor ‘harvest’ of so-called ‘progressive’ governments in Latin America in terms of real structural changes in favor of the poor. Most of these governments took the electoral support of progressive grassroots movements for granted – although these movements were largely responsible for their entering into power – and therefore, much like the Democrats in the USA – have pandered principally to the private sector and to the Centre Right through a class conciliation strategy based on parliamentary pacts, concessions, and electoral alliances. As a result, when seen from the perspective of these same movements, the evaluation of these governments depends on whether one has a glass half-full or a glass half-empty perspective, though many would argue that the glass is more like 90% empty or only 10% full. 

In this sense, people are losing hope in Western-style electoral ‘democracy,’ and increasingly asking what to do if the state is not coming to save them. We feel that the Zapatistas speak directly to that. We have tried to show in this book that Zapatismo offers a new theory and practice concerning alternatives to the conventional bourgeois state. 

We would never suggest that Zapatista practice offers a blueprint that can be simply replicated elsewhere, but rather that it provides refreshing outside-the-box ideas that could reinvigorate debates on the Left around the world.

Tanya: A fascinating point raised in the book is Subcomandante Marcos's statement that the revolution became "essentially moral... ethical," centred on the indigenous concept of "dignity". How fundamental was this to the Zapatistas' unique identity and longevity? 

Lia: Zapatismo is a social and political movement that incorporates different traditions of peoples’ struggles, revolutionary political theory, and revolutionary practice, including Marxist influences. For the Zapatistas, as highlighted by Subcomandante Moise, the occupation of land is in itself an important element in taking back the means of production, especially for peasant farmers. When Marcos says that every revolutionary process fundamentally requires a moral and ethical dimension, he is referring to dignity as a political principle which, in the case of indigenous peoples, represents the demand to be recognised as human beings with collective rights. 

In the tradition of indigenous peoples’ struggles in Latin America, there is a shared criticism of the Left in its intellectual, academic, and party expressions, for having always thought of indigenous peoples as ‘pre-political’ or ‘apolitical’.  The Peruvian communist José Carlos Mariátegui was one of the pioneers in breaking with this colonial and modern tradition centred on the urban industrial proletariat.  He argued that, with the historical underpinning of Inca communalism (a close relative of communism?), the revolutionary subject in Peru — and by extension Latin America — is the indigenous peasant subject, since the European-style industrial working class is minimal. 

In this sense, Zapatismo and the indigenous people’s movement in general put forth the moral and ethical dimension of dignity and of a vision of revolution that does not necessarily seek to reproduce the subject of modernity: generally a white, literate, Western man. Dignity has a brown face, a millennial history, and a distinct onto-epistemic paradigm that existed before, and exists beyond, the modern Western paradigm. 

Peter: Another dimension of dignity for the Zapatistas harks back to Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and his exhortation that a true revolutionary needs to lead by ethical example, in this case, an example of dignity, human dignity. And that a revolutionary must be scrupulously honest and always show respect for other people. In the book, we argue that Zapatistas are the most emblematic contemporary case of coherence between discourse and practice. One of the reasons voters have drifted to the Right in Latin America is the not-unfounded perception that Left parties, once they have a piece of power, show the same kinds of corruption as the Right. The Zapatistas in this sense are a counterexample, exemplifying dignity, honesty and coherence.

Tanya: If you had to distil the ultimate lesson from the Zapatista women’s struggle for contemporary movements, what would it be?

Lia: As we argue in our book, Zapatista women carried out the first ‘insurgency’ internally in the communities, during the clandestine period before the actual armed uprising, with the Revolutionary Law of Women that constitutes the synthesis of a socio-historical and political analysis carried out by Zapatista women regarding the inseparability of oppression in its colonial, patriarchal, racist, and capitalist dimensions.

In relation to patriarchy, we identify three approaches that underpin its conception from the perspective of Zapatista women: 1) as a system of oppression based on ethnic-racial and class mechanisms; 2) as the imitation by indigenous men of the behavior of the colonizer; and 3) as a pedagogical relationship for putting questions of gender domination on the table for discussion and debate within communities, so that they question their internal sociocultural and political relations. 

In the book, we argue that in diverse aspects of their political and organisational processes, the Zapatistas use patriarchy as a pedagogical mediation, which we call the “Pedagogy of Patriarchy.” This was to be the first major learning experience for Zapatista women, that is, their developing their own concepts of patriarchal domination.

A second fundamental lesson relates to their conception of struggle as women — Mujeres que Luchan (“Women who Struggle”) — a conception that problematizes urban and/or Western strands of feminism that demand the explicit positioning of indigenous women as feminists, when they do not necessarily define themselves as such. As the Zapatistas say, they do not necessarily need to define themselves as feminists when they are carrying out the struggle of women daily, which they define differently. 

Likewise, they consider it extremely important that the process of liberation be, as they themselves say, “equal” for women and for men. That is why they emphasise that they walk side by side with men, even though they recognise that they still must confront the ancestral patriarchy that manifests itself in their communities. At their International Encounters of Women Who Struggle, the Zapatistas have been very clear in saying that, although we may differ in our ways of struggling, at the end of the day, we are all women, we all suffer the violence of patriarchy and of capitalism, and we must see ourselves in the unity of diversity. That is why they refer to the “forest of women”, a way of naming and calling for experiencing sisterhood in multiple dimensions of the defence of human and non-human life.

Peter: Lia has previously written how the Zapatista ‘Women who Struggle’, as well as peasant feminism and Latin American community feminism, all take an explicit position differentiating themselves from Western feminisms, urban feminisms, and middle-class feminisms. That is not to say that they do not see themselves as all part of the same global forest of women who struggle, but rather that they are, to stretch the metaphor, a different kind of tree, as indigenous, peasant, rural, poor and community-based women, with both similar and differentiated issues of struggle. These currents all demand an equal place for women alongside men in shared struggles against capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy and racism.

Tanya: Could you talk about the Zapatista analysis of the world as a "hacienda" where presidents are merely "foremen" (good or bad) for capital as a much-needed critique of electoral politics. You note they ask, “Will they be satisfied with a change of foreman or boss, or do they want freedom?”

Lia: For us, the Zapatistas construct a Marxist conception of the state and power, understanding clearly that colonial and, later, capitalist social formation is based on private ownership of land (which is why they emphasize that the recovery of land is the taking back of the means of production), on class exploitation, and on power relations that are simultaneously colonial and imperialist in nature. They also challenge the Left on the extent to which true freedom can be achieved when the struggle for hegemony is limited to the electoral arena. This echoes Marx's analysis of the differences between political emancipation and human emancipation. We believe that the Zapatistas shed light on this historical contradiction and how important it is to bear in mind that the state is the product of primitive accumulation, and its historical existence has the central purpose of guaranteeing the reproduction of capital and power relations. It must be clear that a revolutionary horizon requires the destruction of the Western capitalist state form.

Peter: As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "the state is the executive committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie." Zapatismo analyses the failures of Centre Left parties who came to power through elections to change much of anything for the poor, other than demobilising and “undignified” cash transfers to plastic debit cards designed for social control. They believe that in the historical trajectory of any given country, capitalism sometimes needs a “bad” administrator or foreman (president), who can move the capitalist agenda forward by repression and force. But this often reaches a limit as the cost of increasing protest grows, so capitalism brings in a “good” administrator or foreman to calm things down by ‘sweet-talking’ the poor and giving them handouts. As these handouts become more expensive over time, capitalism then goes back and brings in another “bad” president to cancel those programs and use brute force again. They see a never-ending cycle of good and bad foremen, with small gains and big losses for the poor, but no real change. As they say, the foreman changes, but the profits still go to the big boss. They want us to break that cycle, via autonomy. This is what our book is really about. 

We argue elsewhere that autonomy in one’s home villages, communities and territories is a good strategy for any people’s movement, whether it seeks larger-scale autonomy from the state or whether it seeks to dispute national policies inside the state. This is because the strength or weakness of a movement, when it reaches the national stage, will still largely be determined by how strong it is “at home,” in its “rear guard,” in the villages and territories.  

Our final and also crucial lesson from the Zapatistas is that autonomy should not be “mono-ethnic,” as that is divisive. Even though they are a movement composed of indigenous people, they are not struggling for and building “ethnic autonomy.” Rather, they are building people’s, class-based, popular and radical autonomy, self-governing from below.  We try to clarify this in our book.

The Internationalist Archive