Introduction

On New Year’s Day in 1994, displaced indigenous communities in Chiapas, México organized an uprising where they fought against the military to reclaim land and sociopolitical recognition. At the outset of this project, my mother encouraged me to investigate the history of the Zapatista movement, known for its anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal politics. In the summer of 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests following the murders of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and Breonna Taylor by the Louisville police, neoliberal democratic complaints of property destruction dominated the main media outlets. Hence, I wanted to focus on Zapatismo and the EZLN’s (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) use of guerilla warfare and civil disobedience, as means for obtaining indigenous autonomy and resisting the dominion of the free-market economy.

Rooted in the ideology of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, the Zapatista community points to neoliberal capitalism as central to class polarization. In fact, the 1994 rebellion occurred on the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) materialized; NAFTA worked to reduce trade regulations among the United States, Mexican, and Canadian governments and private corporations. Zapatistas identify capitalism and neoliberal policies as the residue of imperialism and responded to bureaucratic incompetency with rebellion and the constitution of a social movement. In an increasingly interconnected and inequitable world mediated by private ownership, the Zapatista community denies hegemonic conceptions of authority and governance, opting to exercise insurgency as a form of empowered participation.

Identifying Inequity as Symptomatic of Private Ownership & Responding with Collective Mobilization

After the early 2000s recession and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement which followed soon after, more scholars became interested in examining the social ramifications of the global institution of neoliberal capitalism. Thomas Piketty was arguably the first to empirically prove what the masses had long argued; the French economist found that capitalism and the free market have systematized the unequal distribution of resources. Class stratification exists as a byproduct of privatization and free-market policies because “capital, and the money that it produces, accumulates faster than growth in capital societies” (Hussey 2014: 2). Piketty reiterates that global inequality began accelerating at an unprecedented pace in “the 1980s when controls on capital were lifted in many rich countries” (Hussey 2014: 2). Ironically, since neoliberalism’s inception, capital societies have prided themselves on being champions of the free world.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, neoliberalism rose to dominate the economic ideologies of the contemporary imperial powers and their global relations. Scholars like Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama praised the free-market economy as the ideological height of mankind; nearly three decades ago, in 1989, the political scientist asserted that society could no longer progress, as freedom and equality had already been achieved. Fukuyama describes capital societies as liberal utopias where “the roots of economic behavior lie in the realm of consciousness and culture” (Fukuyama 1989: 4). Rather, capitalism and burgeoning free-market policies have exacerbated inequality and fostered a global class-oriented hierarchy by “concentrat[ing] more and more wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people” (Hussey 2014: 3). Liberal individualist approaches to socioeconomic relations persistently neglect the structural inequalities that predate and exist as part of the capitalist ideology and notions of power. Moreover, historic advancements in long-distance technology during the developmental stages of the digital age expedited globalization, or the “widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life” (Held et al. 1999: 2). Globalization catalyzed a monumental turn in the optimization of production, where large corporations began to outsource labor to the Global South to minimize wages and maximize profit. Wealth thereby accumulates exponentially for the affluent as their private property and stocks gain value, and as the means of production become more efficient and less costly.

According to Marxist ideology, the capitalist state is governed by the wealthy ruling class that aims to control the means of production and to concentrate capital to wield authority. Bob Jessop re-examines and illuminates Marxist critiques of the state, stressing that “Marx’s analysis of the state was related to the development of the world market. Marx and Engels wrote that ‘[t]he relations of different nations among themselves depend on the extent to which each has developed its productive forces’” (Jessop 2020: 278). Imperial nations, like the United States and England, continue to command global relations because they were the first to accomplish post-industrialization by outsourcing manufacturing work to formerly colonized nations, like Mexico and Brazil. However, as Marx and Engels anticipated in The Communist Manifesto, bureaucratic capitalism “cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers” (Marx & Engels 1848: 21). Expanded upon by Jessop, although the modern representative state “gives political power through universal suffrage to the proletariat, peasantry, and petty bourgeoise, whose social slavery the constitution is to perpetuate, it sustains the social power of the bourgeoise by guaranteeing private property rights” (Jessop 2020: 275). The material inequity generated by the notion of private ownership casts doubt upon neoliberal capitalism’s cosmopolitan and humanistic ethos, making it “vulnerable to destabilization or crisis if an institutionalized class compromise cannot be secured via normal political means” (Jessop 2020: 275). However, Marxist theory tends to discount the function of bureaucracy in capitalist hegemony.

Bureaucracy is characterized by a set of rules and regulatory processes which impart an aura of legal-rational authority, thereby manufacturing acceptance from the masses. Max Weber asserts that “modern capitalist enterprises are themselves unequalled models of strict bureaucratic organization. Business management throughout rests on increasing precision, steadiness, and, above all, the speed of operations” (Weber 2009: 215). Bureaucracies impose administrative systems and ultimately have six defining attributes: predetermined rules, impersonal behavior and services, division of labor, task specialization, and documentation of rules (SOC189K Class 10 Slides). Given that bureaucracy exists to maintain capitalist domination through management by non-elected governing bodies, Weber claims that “the decisive means for politics is violence” (Weber 2009: 24). Violence through policy has historically been waged on the exploited and excluded classes to enforce submission and deepen socioeconomic inequity. As a response to the injustice characteristic of capitalist bureaucracy, social movements form to advocate for the collective and to disrupt authority.

While social movements can take several forms, they ultimately work to garner communal organization around a particular cause and to stimulate institutional adjustments. Manuel Castells provides a nuanced framework for examining a variety of social movements. While he ultimately highlights identity as central to the organization of social movements, he finds “it useful to categorize them in terms of Alain Touraine’s classic typology that defines a social movement by three principles: the movement’s identity, the movement’s adversary, and the movement’s vision or social model,… [or] societal goal” (Castells 2010: 74). Furthermore, Castells acknowledges that social movements must “be understood in their own terms… to establish the relationship between the movements, as defined by their practice, their values, and their discourse, and the social processes to which they seem to be associated” (Castells 2010: 73). Making sense of social movements as they are characterized by their proponents makes it easier to analyze them within the context of the greater social, political, and economic institutions they inhabit.

Situating the 1994 Uprising & Zapatismo Ideology within Mexican Policy & Economic Relations

Chiapas is located in the southernmost region of Mexico, right on the border of Guatemala. The indigenous communities native to Chiapas include the Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Zoque, Chol, and Tojolobal peoples who endured generations of settler colonialism and imperial exploitation (Harvey 1995: 56). As neoliberalism emerged during the late twentieth century, the region played an extremely crucial and profitable role in the production of agriculture. Chiapas was “the nation’s largest source of coffee, providing approximately 40 percent of the annual harvest—an amount equal by itself, before the oil boom of the 1970s, to 4 to 5 percent of the country’s export income. It was also consistently one of the top 5 of 31 Mexican states in chocolate, sugar, bananas, and other tropical fruits, commercial corn and beans, and, at different periods, rubber, cotton, and rice” (Rus, Hernández-Castillo and Mattiace 2001: 8). Before the region became an important site of capital extraction and production for global corporations, the Mexican state had begun to make efforts toward land redistribution (Deere & León 2001:46).

Up until the Salinas administration from 1988 to 1994, indigenous communities operated ejidos under the set of agrarian laws which formed Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution. In 1992, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari sought to reform Article 27 to allow ejidatarios “the legal right to purchase, sell, rent or use as collateral the individual plots and communal lands which make up the ejidos” (Harvey 1995: 53). Salinas blatantly disregarded the purpose of the ejidos, which was to redistribute land to indigenous families and to provide them with aid from the state.

“The basic principles governing ejido and indigenous community land were that land could not be used as collateral, could not leave the family (although the status of ejidatario was inheritable), could not be sold to a non-ejido member, and could not be rented to outsiders. In most ejidos constituted under the Lázaro Cárdenas administration (1934-1940), the first period of massive land redistribution, lands were worked collectively and resembled production cooperatives. The ejidos also received considerable state support in this period in subsidized credit and technical assistance” (Deere & León 2001:46; emphasis added).

The socially-oriented production of the ejidos deteriorated as President Salinas charged toward liberalization and “privatization in accordance with NAFTA” (Castells 2010: 78). As indigenous peasant communities lost access to the land that sustained their livelihoods, the lack of regulations characteristic of the free market increased “poverty, scarcity of land and work, and decreas[ed] access to services, especially to health care,” “weakening [the] peasant economy, not just in Chiapas but throughout rural Mexico” (Olivera 2005: 612). Indigenous rights to land and autonomy continued to be violated throughout the 1990s, when Mexican neoliberal policies “ended restrictions on imports of corn, and eliminated protection on the price of coffee. The local economy, based on forestry, cattle, coffee, and corn, was dismantled” (Castells 2010: 78). Heightened economic disparity ensued and indigenous communities experienced greater deprivations of their freedom. Arguably, these policies worked strategically to suppress indigenous rights and to make legal preparations for the privatization of agrarian land in Chiapas. Thousands of people engaged in peaceful protest against indigenous displacement and political exclusion, marching from “Palenque to Ciudad de México,” but their calls went ignored by the state (Castells 2010: 78). In response, indigenous communities started organizing to reformulate their methods of demonstration.

On January 1, 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) staged a coup against the Mexican state, demanding political recognition and challenging recent neoliberal reforms. Rebels utilized guerilla warfare tactics to seize the Chiapas capital, formerly known as San Cristóbal de las Casas, and several towns in the surrounding area (Manaut, Selee and Arnson 2006: 132). The media centered on Subcomandante Marcos as the Zapatista community’s ‘leader,’ however, Zapatismo ideologically implements to practice of collective leadership. The Mexican government is said to have identified Marcos as a former professor at “one of the best universities in Mexico DF. He is clearly a very learned intellectual, who speaks several languages, writes well, is extraordinarily imaginative, has a wonderful sense of humor, and is at ease in his relationship with the media (Castells 2010: 79). The EZLN was eventually met by the Mexican military and engaged in battle until a ceasefire was declared on the 12th of January. Through the use of insurgency, a form of anti-bureaucratic political resistance, the EZLN radically cultivates collective forms of governance in the struggle for their right to operate independently from the state.

While an agreement was reached between rebels and the Mexican state, the government failed to officially incorporate the Zapatista community’s requests. This agreement was the 1996 San Andrés Accords signed by the EZLN and the Mexican government that “recognized the collective rights, autonomy, and self-determination of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. The accords, however, were never ratified” (Hackbarth & Mooers 2019). The state continues to wage violence on Zapatista communities through military occupation and ecological destruction. In 2019, there were “77 military bases in Chiapas, most of them located in the autonomous regions controlled by the Zapatistas and/or in areas rich in natural resources: water, uranium, and the barite used for fracking and the drilling of oil wells” (Hackbarth & Mooers 2019). The EZLN and Zapatista rebels, despite federal opposition, continued mobilization since the 1994 insurgency. During the fall of 2019, a statement was released by the EZLN in which Subcomandante Moisés announced “11 new caracoles, or autonomous zones, in the southern state… The EZLN already has five caracoles in Chiapas as well as 27 rebel Zapatista autonomous municipalities… The expansion will give the army 43 rebel areas” (Mexico News Daily 2019). Members of the Zapatista movement mobilize toward radical democracy through challenging bureaucratic authority and reimagining governance as a collective and deliberative social relationship.

Redefining Civil Disobedience as Empowered Participation

The EZLN rebellion of 1994 materialized after centuries of indigenous sociopolitical exclusion and economic manipulation. The native communities living in and around the Lacandón Jungle were “created by forced resettlement which broke up original identities from different communities and brought them together as peasants,” generating new conceptions of indigenous identity through shared experiences (Castells 2010: 81). Under subjugation, an extended indigenous collective emerged and the political-ideological formation of Zapatismo followed soon after (Castells 2010: 81). Not only did the insurgents hope to challenge contemporary imperialism camouflaged as neoliberalism, but they also sought to upset the 1994 presidential election. The PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), of which President Salinas was affiliated, held power for an uninterrupted 71-year period (Brittanica 2018). Seeking radical, leftist democracy, the EZLN tactfully chose to stage the uprising “in an election that was supposed to liberalize the PRI’s hold on the state… [which] was a major factor in protecting them from outright repression. President Salinas wanted to establish his legacy as both economic modernizer and political liberalizer… Under these circumstances, [he] could hardly launch all-out military repression against a genuine peasant, Indian movement fighting against social exclusion” (Castells 2010: 82). Zapatista rebels took advantage of the very illusory policies that caused them harm, calling out the contradictions inherent to neoliberal capitalism by engaging in civil disobedience (Jessop 2020: 271). Militancy and insurgency are, thus, important forms of protest in neoliberal capital societies because they challenge traditional notions of power and citizen participation.

The Mexican state insisted that the 1992 ejido reforms would increase freedom and rights for ejidatarios.  Instead, the alterations were “part of the government’s general strategy in favour of private capital” (Harvey 1995: 53). Salinas’ disingenuous policies would allow international corporations to buy and privately own land that previously belonged to ejidatarios. In 1994, NAFTA aimed to maximize the wealth of private corporations, bureaucrats, and the liberal elite by capitalizing on the proliferation of indigenous labor and natural resources in México; Mexican policy-makers maneuvered agrarian codes to ensure “that Chiapas’s indigenous communities would provide a regularly increasing labor supply to the state’s steadily expanding agriculture” (Rus, Hernández-Castillo and Mattiace 2001: 9-10). The EZLN fought against and spoke to their experiences with the exploitative core of neoliberal capitalism more than twenty years before Thomas Piketty. Piketty acknowledges that his findings had been “intuited by ordinary people… This is why his book has crossed over into the mainstream – it says what many people have already been thinking” (Hussey 2014: 2). While Piketty denounced capitalism after observing empirical data and analyzing the extent of the wealth gap, the Zapatista community personally endured the injustice fomented by laissez-faire economics. Zapatistas understood that the socially liberal ethos taken on by capitalists was simply a facade; a tactic used to deceive the public into complying with, or even agreeing with, neoliberalism. The Zapatista community agreed then that they could not trust a government interested in the privatization of property and determined that they would establish an autonomous, self-governed community. Piketty calls for “a progressive tax, a global tax, based on the taxation of private property” but does not speak to the inequality inherent in the notion of private property (Hussey 2014: 5). Without engaging in reimaginations of the current system of governance, Piketty’s understanding of global society fails to recognize the injustice intrinsic to capitalist power structures.

The Zapatista community took a multifaceted theoretical approach in defining their politics and obtaining political recognition. The Zapatistas’ “opposition to the new global order is twofold: they fight against the exclusionary consequences of economic modernization, but they also challenge the inevitability of a new geopolitical order under which capitalism becomes universally accepted” (Castells 2010: 81). However, their calls for political reform and governmental recognition following the uprising rather than more transformational forms of change failed, amounting to no semblance of institutional justice (Castells 2010: 85). Initially, in 1994, the EZLN neglected traditional authority and regulations, situating the movement as anti-bureaucratic by laying claim to the legitimate exercise of “physical force within a given territory” (Weber 2009: 1). By employing guerilla warfare to resist the government, the Zapatista community put Marx and Engel’s predictions into action. The Communist Manifesto implores the masses to rise up and endeavor “towards a classless society and form of self-rule that would defend the interests of the ‘entire community [Gemeinwesen]’” (Marx & Engels 1848: 18). The bourgeois devises its own destruction by confining the masses to the same space of labor and situating the proletariat as a vital cog in the machine of capitalism. The state disenfranchised the indigenous groups in Chiapas and pushed them to create solidarity with one another to protect themselves from the corrupt forces of capitalism. Still, economic and political authority is mediated by autonomous bureaucrats and the liberal elite, so in the years following the uprising, the EZLN was forced to advocate for political reforms.

After years of political neglect following the rebellion, the Zapatistas took it upon themselves to institute new caracoles and autonomous municipalities to carry out their demands of self-governance. Organizers figured that the only route to land redistribution and cultural practice rights would be to reclaim them, so the community organized themselves on non-hegemonic practices without support from the state. For instance, the leadership committee is “comprised of civilian Zapatista comandantes who are in turn beholden to the authority of their respective communities, a relationship that exemplifies the Zapatista slogan, ‘to lead by obeying’” (Khasnabish 2008: 35). Zapatistas defy traditional concepts of power and governance, which typically resemble domination; rather, they hold their authority figures accountable to the wants and needs of the community. Zapatistas identify autonomy as one of their foundational beliefs, similar in fact to neoliberals. However, the Zapatismo ideology highlights “interconnectedness, because a world that does not recognize existence as shared and interdependent is a world pitted against itself, a world doomed to replicate exclusion, division, and violence” (Khasnabish 2008: 35). Neoliberalism is inherently contradictory; it is said to have fostered the free world, meanwhile its proponents spare no effort at depriving the indigenous community of their rights. Empowerment under bureaucracy and free-market capitalism can only exist outside of their ideological frameworks: “the proletariat must… find new words to express its class interests and mobilize other forces for a new social revolution” (Jessop 2020: 277; emphasis added).

Conclusion

The institutions that uphold private property may face opposition as more people across the world undergo become conscious of class and face increased disillusionment under contemporary capitalism. While Piketty proved that neoliberal capitalism has engendered global economic inequality and has worsened the quality of life, indigenous communities around the world experience these ramifications first-hand. The Zapatista community exposed their experiences of injustice in 1994 through rebellion. They challenged bureaucratic relations, inefficacies, and conceptions of power, revealing the contradictory nature of democratic capitalism. Zapatistas initiated the revolutionary imagination of frameworks for collective governance that foster deliberation rather than the accumulation of power. Following the EZLN insurgency of 1994, the Zapatista community received global attention and support through their tactical use of the Internet and digital modes of communication (Castells 2010: 82-84). Moving forward, it will be greatly fascinating to observe the ways that social movements throughout the twenty-first century resist the dominant global order by wielding the vast affordances of social media and digital interaction.

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