(Monthly Review) Northern intellectuals and the EZLN.
Mauricio Banda
Nugent, Daniel
Monthly Review, July-August 1995 v47 n3
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1995 Monthly Review
In recent decades, important trends in social and cultural analysis
have been qualified with the prefix "post." Today social scientists,
for instance, are expected to know something about poststructuralism,
postmodernism, post-Fordism, and even something called post-Marxism. A
situation once identified as "colonial" is said by some to have been
supplanted by another, called "postcolonial." Whatever the virtues of
these perspectives - for the challenges they present to conventional
understandings, for generating new forms of critique - they are of
little value for understanding contemporary historical developments;
worse, they have introduced a vocabulary and form of presentation that
obscure considerably more than they reveal.
Other essays in this issue outline the main characteristics of
postmodernist "discourse." For present purposes, it will be enough to
cite a particularly compelling example to illustrate how this
discourse is now being applied to what used to be called the "Third
World." That example is found in the work of Gayatri Spivak, who once
remarked that "Class is the purest form of signifier," implying that
class is a "pure" linguistic symbol in the sense that it has no
concrete referent in the material world.(1) From the vantage point of
the sort of linguistic theory on which so many postmodernist discourse
analysts draw, the quality of the referent is less important than the
location of concepts like class in relation to other "signifiers." So
Spivak is able to say, for instance, that "socialism" has "no
historically adequate referent" in India, by which she means that
Indian socialism did not originate in a truly indigenous tradition of
socialist discourse. Aijaz Ahmad has recently commented on this
observation in a way that nicely captures the postmodernist notion of
"history." To be told that socialism has no "historically adequate
referent" in India, he remarks, would come as a big surprise to all
those millions of Indians who, for reasons having to do with their own
experience of their own domestic capitalism and their own situation in
its class divisions, regularly vote Communist. The "historical
referent" for Indian socialism, in other words, is not some
disembodied imperial "discourse" but Indian capitalism and a political
practice "undertaken within India by Indian political subjects."(2)
That is one way of summing up the difference between postmodernism and
Marxism. It isn't that Marxism is uninterested in language, discourse,
or meaning, and the best historical-materialist work deals precisely
with the many different concrete referents that words like "class" or
"work" can have in specific historical conditions. But here I simply
want to underline that Marxism can understand the practices through
which meanings are produced in relation to the actions of people on
and in the world and not just in relation to other meanings. Practices
are undertaken in particular places at particular times by particular
subjects in particular conditions, and these have to be studied
historically.
Say, for instance, we want to analyze Mexican society, whether viewed
through the prism of the Mexican revolution of 1910, or the
neo-Zapatista revolution in Chiapas starting on January 1, 1994, or
the crisis of the state and the ruling party in recent months. A
starting point would be to recognize that Mexico has long been a
"postcolonial society." Mexico has moved along temporally - if not
developmentally - from an earlier colonial condition for almost two
centuries. Yet one of the most striking features of the ways in which
political power is organized socially and experienced subjectively
throughout Mexico - whether in the "advanced" northern state of
Chihuahua or the "backward" southeastern state of Chiapas - is that it
is and remains a profoundly colonial or, in a pinch, neocolonial
rather than unequivocally postcolonial form of power. Neither the Wars
of Independence and the Wars of the Reform during the nineteenth
century, nor the revolution of 1910 and the "re forms" of
Salinastroika in the period 1988-1994 during the twentieth century,
signalled irreversible, radical breaks with the past. Rather, they are
moments in a sustained process of transformation. That series of
political transformations was associated with a series of economic
transformations that established the specific form of Mexican
capitalism. The language of "pre" and "post," which pretends to be
about historical change, actually disguises these processes of
transformation by carving up history into discontinuous and
disconnected units.
Nevertheless, the lure of intellectual fashion is so great that
scholars who two decades ago worked with peasants in Mexico, and wrote
about social movements, rural class formation, and the permanent
character of the primitive accumulation of capital in dependent,
peripheral states, now author postmodernist essays and books with
titles (e.g., Hybrid Cultures) and themes (the metaphor of a
salamander to organize reflections on Mexican history) that have more
in common with magical realist literature than with historical
materialist analysis. This is not to suggest that magical realism -
say, the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende - has
nothing to tell us, and that only historical materialism can reveal
the Truth. It is only to underline the radical differences between
literary and historical ways of relating to social reality.
Perhaps it should come as little surprise that some
postmodern/postcolonial critics seem, or pretend, not to know that the
arenas of discourse in which their work circulates are at several
removes from the social reality they purport to represent. The
privileges now enjoyed by intellectuals in the North have been so
reduced that many seem to be compensating by providing to themselves
an inflated sense of their own importance and the significance of
purely intellectual or "discursive" practices. Nonetheless, the
distinction between what is being talked about and how it is being
talked about remains important. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez is reported
to have said to Carlos Fuentes while discussing the turn taken by
internecine struggles within the ruling party in Mexico in the early
months of 1995, "We are going to have to throw our books into the sea.
We've been totally defeated by reality."(3) If a litterateur can get
the point, why can't a literary theorist?
Yet postmodern concepts and assumptions, even casual turns of phrase,
have a real seductive power over many intellectuals; and the
freewheeling adoption of a postmodern vocabulary is having especially
insidious effects on the study of current historical developments.
This is particularly evident in the boatloads of material published
about the EZLN uprising in Chiapas, the rebellion of the damned in the
South that woke up the world on the morning of January 1, 1994. In the
rush to issue accounts of this seemingly unprecedented and original
popular uprising, the expression "postmodern" fell quite easily from
the pens and mouths of many commentators. More than a year after the
EZLN challenged the power of the Mexican state, meanwhile, we read on
the New York Times Op-Ed page that "the Mexican Meltdown of 1995 is
the first postmodern economic crisis."(4)
Beside an unending stream of English-language publications providing
profiles of the EZLN or its spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos, several
computer networks devoted solely to distributing information about the
EZLN have appeared as well. It's as though the circulation of
information, the communication and production of commentaries in the
English-language book and electronic media, is mirroring the
production by impoverished Chiapan peasants-become-artisans of
"Marcos" and "Ramona" dolls, the small wooden figures clothed not in
traditional Mayan garb but in the outfits of the EZLN, complete with
miniature ski masks and wooden rifles.
It is perfectly in keeping with the postmodernist worldview that a
major theme in accounts of the Chiapan rebels has to do with the media
of communication through which "we" in the North learn about, and
relate to, the EZLN. "In Marcos' prose," writes one specialist, "one
senses an expertise and familiarity with computer-based text, if not
directly with e-mail."(5) putting things this way (which assumes that
guerrillas are freely able to tap into electric power lines in a state
in which, though it generates half the hydroelectric power in all of
Mexico, most towns are not wired for electricity) diverts attention
and analysis from an explicit consideration of the actual goals and
accomplishments of the neo-Zapatistas and their connection to other
currents within Mexican, Latin American, and North American society.
It shifts attention instead toward the postmodern world of digital
simultaneity. In being asked to assess "what effect the e-mail
activity [h as] had on actual events," we are presented with the image
of "new icons of romantic rebellion" "bursting through ... TV screens"
and the powerful effect of "the Zapatista presence on the Internet."
Asserting that the multiple messages resonating "within the nocturnal
hacker community" have a palpable historical effect fits perfectly the
notion that neo-Zapatismo is indeed a "postmodern political
movement."(6) Focusing on, even celebrating, the EZLN's use of modems,
fax machines, and e-mail suggests that their most distinctive feature
as a political movement is to have shifted the object of struggle from
control of the means of production to control of the means of
communication; revolutionary ideals are to be advanced by the free
exchange of rebel-friendly software and communications packages. But
this way of thinking about the rebellion tends to block out the years
of organizing that preceded January 1, 1994. To assert the fundamental
"postmodernity" of the EZLN is not really to analyze "actual events"
in Chiapas. It is more a way of allowing some intellectuals to
appropriate these events, to situate these complex historica l
developments on their own (intellectual) terrain, to assimilate them
to a discourse that permits computer-literate academics to feel good
about themselves.
A Postmodern Political Movement?
Particularly disconcerting is the manner in which claims regarding the
postmodernity of the EZLN are repeated by people on the left. An
example that springs to mind is Roger Burbach's essay on the "Roots of
the Postmodern Rebellion in Chiapas" published in the New Left Review
last summer, where the EZLN is described as "a postmodern political
movement" that attempts "to move beyond the politics of modernity."(7)
Once past these introductory remarks, Burbach presents a compelling,
competent, and concise description of the neocolonial background to
the 1994 uprising. Drawing on recent research by anthropologists,
sociologists, and political scientists familiar with the region,
Burbach presents an analysis that is not particularly "postmodern" in
either form or structure. He demonstrates that the rebellion occurred
in Chiapas when it did because a particular form of capitalism has
been adopted in this region of the world. Outlining the ways labor
migration is related to the alienation of the peasantry from the land,
how commercial agriculture, especially of coffee production, is
buffetted by fluctuations in international commodity prices, and how
strategic relocations of squatters are engineered by the Mexican state
while large landowners and ranchers continue to rely on hired gun
thugs (the guardias blancas), Burbach gives some substantive content
to the notion of "combined and uneven development.& quot;
Nevertheless, in its opening and closing paragraphs, where the
assertion of the fundamental "postmodernity" of the EZLN is repeated
time and again, the essay is symptomatic of what can happen when
northern intellectuals, even those on the left, become enchanted by a
sort of postmodernist identity politics. This adoption of postmodern
vocabulary and categories of analysis winds up revealing more about
academic politics in the North than it does about the situations these
analyses are meant to explain. I think it is worth closely examining
some of these passages in Burbach's article in order to appreciate
fully the absurdities to which such analyses can lead.
The opening paragraph begins thus:
The Indian uprising in Chiapas that burst upon the world scene in
January is a postmodern political movement. The rebellion is an
attempt to move beyond the politics of modernity ....
It is difficult to see how a rebel army of peasants, aware of itself
as the product of five hundred years of struggle, that quotes from the
Mexican constitution to legitimate its demand that the president of
Mexico immediately leave office, that additionally demands work, land,
housing, food, health, education, independence, liberty, democracy,
justice, and peace for the people of Mexico, can be called a
"postmodern political movement." How can the EZLN move beyond the
politics of modernity when their vocabulary is so patently modernist
and their practical organization so emphatically pre-modern? Their
democratic command structure is a slow-moving form of organization -
requiring as it does direct consultation and discussion with the base
communities in five or six different languages - which is difficult to
reconcile with postmodernist digital simultaneity. Do their demands
include a modem and VCR in every jacale or adobe hut in Mexico? No. Is
their chosen name "The Post modern Army of Multinational Emancipation"
or "Cyberwarriors of the South"? No. They are the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation. Emiliano Zapata (not a free-floating signifier"
but a specific historical subject), who led the peasants of Morelos
from 1911 until his assassination in 1919 in recovering control of the
land and driving out the caciques /foreign political bosses, is a very
unlikely postmodern hero.
Here is the conclusion of the opening paragraph: "Even more
fundamentally, [the rebellion] seeks to end the victimization of
Indians by centuries of western modernization." Again, there is little
particularly "postmodern" about struggling to that end (quite apart
from the fact that pre-modern forms of exploitation are alive and well
and continue to be major targets of struggle). Here it becomes
increasingly difficult to get a grip on what is supposed to be
postmodern. What is the "modernization" which the neo-Zapatistas are
resisting? Does it have something to do with capitalism? Would any
anticapitalist struggle be postmodern? For that matter, since one of
the major conceits of postmodern discourse is that capitalism doesn't
exist, at least as a systematic totality, it hardly makes sense to
talk about a postmodern anticapitalism. And since it is unclear what
historical conditions are being opposed by a postmodern politics, we
are left with the impression that the neo-Zapat ista program is a kind
of historical utopianism, a pipedream of virtual reality, rather than
a pragmatic response to real historical conditions.
Nor is our understanding of postmodernity or of the EZLN much advanced
by the following:
The uprising led by the EZLN ... comes in the wake of the collapse of
the "modern" bipolar world of the post-Second World War era and the
ideological exhaustion of most national liberation movements....
Burbach here appears to be assuming that the collapse of the
"Communist world" signalled the end of modernism. But it is not at all
clear what is supposed to be postmodern about that extremely tentative
great leap forward of neoliberal ideology, the market, and policies
oriented toward capitalist economic restructuration; in some important
respects it may represent a triumph of "modernism." And from an
altogether different point of view, it is possible to view the triumph
of modernism in an optimistic light. As Marshall Berman has written:
1989 was not only a great year, but a great modernist year. First,
because millions of people learned that history was not over, that
they had the capacity to make their own history - though not, alas, in
circumstances chosen by themselves. Second, because in the midst of
their motions, those men and women identified with each other: even in
different languages and idioms, even thousands of miles apart, they
saw how their stories were one story, how they were all trying to make
the modern world their own. I fear that vision has faded from our
public life.(8)
One thing demonstrated by Chiapas 1994 is that the vision to which
Berman refers, almost nostalgically, has once again been drawn into
focus by the appearance of neo-Zapatismo, the forthright clarity of
the communiques from the CCRI-CG (Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous
Committee-General Command), and the writings of Subcomandante Marcos.
At the same time, and particularly in Chiapas, there still remain
bipolar axes of difference - women and men, capital and labor, North
and South, Indian and white - through which peoples lives are
organized, and disorganized, and made miserable. In a sense, then, the
" modern' bipolar world of the post-Second World War era" is stronger
- and more vicious, more destructive, more retrenched - than ever. The
most serious problem facing "most national liberation movements" -
including the EZLN - may not be ideological exhaustion but rather the
threat of physical extermination.
In any case, it is difficult to determine the ideological resources
available to participants in such movements when their own voices are
muted and their own practices obscured by the superimposed discourses
of northern academics. If such movements derive their meaning only
from the terms 6f academic discourses, how different is the
conservative claim that the EZLN is led by "outside agitators" from
the supposedly radical claim that the EZLN is a postmodern political
movement"?
The EZLN and the State
Maybe what really identifies the EZLN as a postmodern movement for
Burbach is this: "What distinguishes the EZLN from its predecessors is
that it is not bent on taking power in Mexico City, nor is it calling
for state socialism."
But in addition to being a curious reason for regarding the movement
as postmodern, this is straightforwardly and simply wrong: wrong about
the EZLN, and wrong about its predecessors. First, in their
declaration of war in late 1993, the first order from the General
Command of the EZLN to its military forces was to "Advance to the
capital of the country, defeat the Mexican Federal Army... and permit
the liberated peoples to elect, freely and democratically, their own
administrative authorities."(9) Second, from the time of the conquest
and even before, Mexican history has been wracked by largescale
popular uprisings and rebellions by peasants and Indians. A key
feature of these mobilizations is that most were, precisely, not "bent
on taking power in Mexico City." Perhaps that's why the peasants and
Indians invariably lost, why each rural revolt has ended with the
victory of the dominant class.
Whatever the extent of violence exercised during earlier popular
uprisings, there has often been a strong antimilitaristic streak
running through them, and an even stronger repudiation of the power of
the state, whether colonial or neocolonial, patrimonial or capitalist.
Two obvious examples that spring to mind are the popular armies led by
Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa between 1911 and 1920. But neither
Villismo and Zapatismo [Mark I] were "bent on taking power in Mexico
City"; nor were either of them calling for "state socialism." To try
to forge a new basis for social life in a way that is grounded in the
experience and responds to the demands - or the requirements for
living - of los de abajo, of the misnamed marginados (who are in fact
not the least bit "marginal" to the continuing reproduction of
specific forms of exploitation) is hardly to call for state socialism.
In any event, "state monopoly capitalism" is a more accurate term for
the sort of socia l system Burbach correctly insists the
neo-Zapatistas are repudiating.
At any rate, throughout the world peasant movements have tended to
regard the state as alien and distant, and typically their revolts
have been directed not at the seizure of state power but at the
replacement of an alien form of rule by a different social order.
Hence it could be argued that the failure to aim for state power is
rather more pre- than postmodern. If Burbach is right about the
neo-Zapatistas' relation to the state, then the EZLN is typically
pre-modern; but if he is wrong, than it is more modern than
"postmodern."
The other side of this coin is Burbach's claim that the EZLN's
objective "is to spark a broad-based movement of civil society in
Chiapas and the rest of Mexico that will transform the country from
the bottom up."
It is undeniable that the EZLN is distinguishable from other popular
social movements in Mexico in the last sixty years in its success at
not only precipitating "a broad-based political and ideological
dialogue" but also in actively mobilizing large groups of people. It
is no less certain that the current effort is not without precedents
outside the conventional circuits of power that flow to and from the
state and the ruling party, the PRI. Many Mexican activists and
popular organizations - some more visible and predictable than others
- share the objective of generating a broad-based movement to
transform society from the bottom up. Alongside human fights
organizations, peasant coordinadoras, and the popular organizations
that sprang out of the rubble of the earthquakes in Mexico City in
1985, are the unofficial and independent trade unions, the millions of
people who voted for Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in 1988, and movements such
as the peasant mobilizations in the northern state of Chihuahua in the
1980s that linked up with peasant mobilizations in Chiapas, just as
others had a century earlier. What distinguishes the EZLN, then, is
not its objective, but the genuinely unprecedented success with which
its initiative has been embraced and taken seriously by many currents
in Mexican society.
Yet however unprecedented the EZLN's apparent success up to now (in
April 1995), it is still hard to see what this has to do with its
postmodernity. Broad-based movements in Mexican society have both
"modern" and "pre-modern" antecedents, and organization in "civil
society" has long been a staple of popular mobilizations. When in his
concluding section Burbach again insists that the EZLN's postmodernist
perspective" is demonstrated by "the demand for authentic democracy,
and transforming society from the bottom up," one can't help wondering
why good old Marxist socialism, with its commitment to securing human
emancipation and a thorough democratization of society beginning with
freely associated direct producers" would not be the epitome of
postmodernity.
The attempt to pin the postmodern label on the EZLN is shot through
with contradictions, which are nicely summed up in the following
observation:
Another central factor facilitating this revolt's postmodernity is
that it is not a rebellion against a typical autocrat or dictator like
Batista or Somoza, but a movement that traces its lineage back to the
early twentieth-century Mexican revolution.
To begin with, it is unclear exactly what Batista or Somoza are
supposed to typify. But the main thing is that the rebels -
communicating in languages understood only by themselves and a handful
of anthropologists, linguists, missionaries, and former Maoists - yet
again appear pretty pre-modern and the enemy they have identified
manifestly modem. What distinguishes the EZLN, even by this account,
is not their postmodern redefinition of temporality, space, and
experience itself, but, on the contrary, their sense of palpable
connection with a tradition. Burbach's observation that "The struggle
of the EZLN ... [is] over how to mobilize the population to recapture
the country's revolutionary ideals" certainly captures something
important about what the neo-Zapatistas are trying to accomplish and
how they are self-consciously building upon past struggles of
historical peasantries in Mexico. But that observation neatly and
decisively subverts his claims for the EZLN as a "postmodern political
movement."
So where does this leave us? The language of postmodernity has added
nothing to our understanding of Chiapas. If anything, it has obscured
and detracted from what is valuable in Burbach's account. It is
especially depressing to observe this effect in an otherwise
illuminating and politically sympathetic study, and it is a measure of
the price we have to pay for this surrender to fashion. Instead of
bringing us closer to an understanding of a complex social movement,
it simply serves to underline the profound distance between postmodern
intellectuals and the activists or supporters of the EZLN.
Why not interject some remarks of a Chihuahuan peasant, asked whether
people in northern Mexico, followers of Francisco Villa, had joined
the revolution in 1910 to recover control of their land? "Put it that
we now have land," replied Cruz Chavez in 1986,
but that was a fight. And justice? And freedom? When will we get that?
Can you tell me? Look, we're gonna die of old age without seeing them,
because the more time that passes, justice and freedom only get worse
in our country.(10)
Now I can imagine at least two different ways of connecting these
remarks to what is happening in Chiapas today. We could simply take
Cruz Chavez's words with those of Subcomandante Marcos and measure
them both against some abstr-act repertoire of signifiers to find out,
for example, whether they are pre- or postmodern discourses.
Alternatively, we could consider these discourses historically,
comparing the ways in which words like "freedom" and "justice" figure
in their respective vocabularies, and how they relate to their
concrete and changing historical referents, their material and social
conditions, their political practices and struggles. We could consider
as well how the labor process in Mexican agriculture has or has not
changed since 1910, how political democracy has or has not advanced.
And we could explore the ways in which the EZLN is trying in practice
to answer the questions posed by Cruz Chavez in a different region of
Mexico, under different historica l conditions, and building
differently on a long history-including the 1910 revolution-of
political struggle.
In the first case, it is hard to see how our objective as
intellectuals could be anything else than to appropriate those
discourses, to claim them as our own. In the second, we would simply
be trying to understand and explain. The latter objective is in some
ways more modest. At least it is less likely to exaggerate the power
of intellectuals, because it acknowledges that we are talking about
social and political practices undertaken by specific people other
than ourselves, instead of claiming that our own discourse is the only
real practice, our academic discourse the only real politics.
Derek Sayer has suggested that "we might want to consider the
possibility that the status of organic intellectual' of anything other
than a ruling class might just be a contradiction in terms."" However
difficult it may be to accept, this suggestion does have the virtue of
acknowledging both the limits and the grounding of intellectual
activity. Something approximating, however remotely, the determinative
power that postmodernist intellectuals claim for their own discursive
practices-the power to create reality itself-is, in the real world,
possible only for servants of a ruling class, with the power of the
state underwriting their discourses. The rest of us should be content
to see our intellectual activity function as a critical instrument, as
a challenge to ruling ideologies, maybe as a guide to political action
when possible, but above all as a way of enhancing or broadcasting,
but not replacing, the voices of those who oppose oppression.
NOTES
(1.) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, to a seminar at the Pembroke Center
for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University, March 1988. (2.)
Aijaz Ahmad, "The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality," Race & Cass
36, 3, (1995), p. 5. (3.) New York Times, March, 1995, p. Al. (4.)
Thomas Friedman, New Mexico,' New York Times March 15, 1995, p. A17.
(5.) Deedee Halleck, "Zapatistas On-Line," NACLA Report on the
Americas 28, no. 2, (September/october 1994), p. 30. (6.) Quotations
above from Halleck, Zapatistas On-line, pp. 31-32. (7.) Roger Burbach,
"Roots of the Postmodern Rebellion in Chiapas", New Left Review 205,
1994, pp. 113-124. (8.) Marshall Berman, "Why Modernism Still
Matters," in Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, eds., Modernity and
Identity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). (9.) Shadows of Tender Fury:
The Letters and Communiques of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1995),
p.53, translated by Frank Bardacke and Leslie Lopez. (10.) Interview
with Cruz Chavez Gutierrez in El Tascate, Namiquipa, Chihuahua, July
1986. This man was the grandson of an earlier Cruz Chavez, who led the
town of Tomochic, Chihuahua, in a briefly successful and still
influential armed uprising against the Mexican state in the early
1890s. (11.) "Some Dissident Remarks on Hegemony" in G. Joseph and D.
Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formmation (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1994), p. 373.