Libcom note: Text below is p5-p13 of an article from Common Sense #22. The full article extends to p37. The full piece is available in PDF form at that link and also in text form here on Libcom.

In January 1994, in the south eastern state of Chiapas in Mexico, news of the Zapatistas armed revolt composed mainly of Indian peasants, travelled all over the world bringing about an explosion of interest and information on Mexico because the rebellion was automatically connected with the Mexican revolution. In this text we undertake an analysis of the class struggles in Mexico since the beginning of the century up till now, which includes a critical presentation of the guerilla movement of the Zapatistas. Among last year's events, a presentation of the "National Democratic Convention" was decided upon, not only because its character transcends the boundaries of Chiapas but also because it is indicative of the political direction of the class struggle. More than a year later nothing has been concluded. Whereas the Zapatistas still constitute a considerable force, the recent devaluation of the peso and the attempted military repression of the movement, has created a deeper crisis of class relations in Mexico.

The following analysis is from a viewpoint which goes beyond the outdated anti-imperialist distinctions of a "First World" and a "Third World". The Capitalist International, the only class unfortunately that has the clearest class consciousness, has seen to that. This class wouldn't have won until now if it hadn't imposed itself on "underdeveloped" and "developed" countries simultaneously. Because to every privatization in West Europe there corresponds a new wave of immigrants from East Europe; to every temp worker there's a former "priviliged" one and to every homeless person in North America there's a landless peasant in South America. It is against this class that the Chiapas ejidatarios rebel, and their struggle has a universal dimension which transcends south east Mexico. It's in fact the same struggle that takes place everywhere already, with different intensity and forms, against immiseration and alienation. If we have managed to show this, then we think we have contributed not only to the Chiapanecos' fight, but to our own.

THE NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION (CONVENTION NATIONAL DEMOCRATICA-CND), SAN CRISTOBAL, CHIAPAS - AGUASCALIENTES, LACANDONA JUNGLE, 6-9 August 1994.
"Zapata vive, la lucha sigue!"

In June 1994 in their Second Declaration from the Lacandona Jungle, the EZLN addressed an invitation to the National Democratic Convention for the purpose of introducing propositions about a transitional government and a new constitution. EZLN's sub-commander Marcos intensified his letter-writing mania inviting Mexican personalities within the left and center-left spectrum. Due to the Zapatista's appeal to "Civil Society" the range of those who finally participated was quite big: non-government organisations in general, leaders of peasant and Indian organisations, members of "independent parties", a few academics, union delegates, feminists, a few businessmen, lesbians, homosexuals, members of organisations in defense of the vote and naturally journalists or fake journalists (like myself). The organising committee of the CND consisted of Zapatistas delegates and various other organisations (the "Caravan of the Caravans", the "Chiapanecos Assembly for Democracy" etc with a dominant view in favour of the elections).

On Saturday 6th of August in San Cristobal Mesas-workshops were formed to discuss the "peaceful transition to democracy, the elections, the formation of a National Project and the defense of the vote". In spite of the great majority of supporters of the oppositional PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) and the prevalent tendency in favour of the elections there was a general distrust of the parties and a minority (1) against the elections and in favour of the formation of a National People's Assembly --a Transitional Government-- consisting of peasants, workers and Indians.

Among the demands of the Mesas (to which the majority agreed) the following ones were included: SalinasÆ resignation, expulsion of members of the PRI (Patry of Institutional Revolution, the government party) from administrative posts, mobilisation against a possible electoral fraud, political trial of Salinas, electoral reform for the representation of the Indians and all the ethnic groups, recognition of the EZLN as a belligerent force, breaking up the system of National Security, non-assumption of office of any candidates in case of high abstention, expulsion of the army from the states of Chiapas, Guerrero amd Michoacan and satisfaction of the 11 demands of the EZLN. All were almost devoutly accepted by the Mesas. The same atmosphere of confusion, recrimination, vexation and euphoria that prevailed on Saturday evening in San Cristobal with thousands of people bustling in and out of the Mesas and discussing in circles in the streets while songs were heard (and tourists were complaining about the sudden lack of rooms) would prevail even more intensely in the jungle.

6 or 7 thousand people -in hundreds of buses- in the drive towards Aguascalientes (2) passed through Mexican army outposts and then through regions controlled by the Zapatistas. Swarms of clapping and cheering Indians could be seen everywhere along the road, many of those holding posters of Zapata and placards with slogans in favour of fair elections.

During the descent to the jungle enthusiasm gave way to exhaustion (the last ones to arrive in Aguascalientes had journeyed for about 24 hours) and then the excitement on first contacting the Zapatistas at their outpost. At last in Aguascalientes Fitzcarraldo's Ship came into view: for 28 days, 600 Zapatistas had constructed this gigantic amphitheatre, made of tree trunks and covered by a huge tent, surrounded by hundreds of smaller tents. Above the stage two Mexican flags were hanging, behind it the honoured guests were seated and the place was full of posters with subjects from the Mexican Revolution. There was a colourful and diverse crowd from elderly, veteran co-fighters of Emiliano Zapata's original army, to young punks, to contemporary armed Zapatistas scattered all over, to reporters armed with cameras; all in an atmosphere of confusion, exuberance, turmoil and comings and goings beneath the hot tropical sun. Angry protests were caused when a mural appeared on the stage depicting Marcos and Zapata on horseback shaking hands and beneath them Cardenas with the bishop of Chiapas Samuel Ruiz (3). Protests from many sides led to the withdrawal of the painting.

Around evening Marcos' appearence on stage set off an outburst of chanting: "Marcos, our friend, the people are with you!", "Transitional Government and a new constitution", "Long live Ramona and Ana Maria" (women Zapatistas), "Long live Self-government by the Indians", "Let the National Convention be an electoral force" but by way of a reply: "All against the electoral farce". Songs about Zapata could be heard as well as the guevarist anthem of the 70Æs "Dressed in olive green, politically alive, comrade, you haven't died, we'll take revenge for your death". Marcos announced the presiding committee of the CND and called upon commander Tacho to speak, who declared that the EZLN give Aguascalientes over to the CND. He also presented the people's committees of the EZLN, the civil guards, Indian women, men and children with scarves on their faces and staves in their hands -one of the most touching moments of the Convention. Afterwards, Marcos presented the EZLN army, whose gun-barrels had white bands around them, indicating that "these guns are not to confront the "Civil Society", but paradoxically, they wish to become useless". Marcos' speech, a mixture of sentimentalism, patriotism, poetry and populism was received reverentially and in dead silence by the audience. After exulting at the large CND attendance, Marcos went on: "thanks to the EZLN having mobilized parts of society which had until recently been sunk in apathy and inability to get over their localisms", he made clear that the EZLN, "(do not expect from the CND) a civil arm... a civil pretext for war...or for submission...nor the dubious honour of a historical vanguard, of the numerous vanguards that made us suffer... We expect from the CND the opportunity to search for and find those to whom we will hand over the flag that we found deserted and forgotten in the palaces of power... To struggle so that all Mexicans will recognize it as their own, to become the national flag again, your flag, companeros... We hope that there will be enough maturity at this CND, so that this place will not be converted into a terrain for settling internal accounts, something sterile and emasculated... We are moving aside but we are not leaving. We hope that the horizon will open up so that we will not be necessary anymore, we the dead since always, who have to die again in order to live. We hope that this CND will give us an opportunity, the opportunity we were denied by those who govern this country, to return to our subterranean life with dignity after we have fulfilled our duty. The opportunity to return to silence, to the night out of which we came, to the death we lived in, the opportunity to disappear in the same way we appeared, one morning, without a face, without future. To return to the depths of history, of the dream, of the mountains..."

Amidst a deluge of applause, Marcos left the stage giving the Mexican flag to Rosario Ibarra (president of the CND and the FNCR, National Front Against Repression, a leftist organisation). These moments of patriotic effusions were soon followed by a real storm; a tropical rain storm that swept over everything. Despite the witticisms subverting the original slogans: "Zapata lives, the struggle goes on" becoming, 'Zapata lives, the rain goes on" -and the few brave ones who half-naked were sloshing about in the mud- it meant the sudden end of the first day of the CND in the jungle. The next day after several participants gave speeches that were no more than greetings and a minimal agreement on mobilizations against a possible election fraud was finalized, there followed MarcosÆ press conference. Confident like a pop star and evasive like a politician, he answered various questions ironically. He expressed again the EZLN's wish for a dignified peace and to make efforts to contact other guerilla armies in the country. To his question if he would take off his mask, Marcos replied, "Yes, if you want it. You tell me". The cries of "NO!" confirmed that the Marcos symbol should remain masked in order to preserve the legend and, in no way, becoming an ordinary, recognizable mortal.

So, in this mish mash of people; in this "Civil Society" in a festive and tense atmosphere somewhere between a rave-up and a political meeting; in this National Convention that wasn't really much of a convention at all, there actually was confirmed a vague and abstract will for "change", "democracy" and "peace". It was a symbolic gesture just before the elections. A manifestation of patriotism and reformism, contradictory expectations and general promises amidst the loud "Viva!".

FROM THE REVOLUTION (1910-1920) ...
"You take Revolucion to the end, turn right and you are on Reforma".

Mexican joke referring to the streets one takes to reach Downtown Mexico City.

At the end of the previous century the Porfiriato, Diaz's dictatorship, combined an expanding capitalist growth with an oligarchic-dictatorial state. Capital's dominance through domestic and foreign monopolies, the centralisation of economy and political power on a national scale caused the gradual disintegration of the old traditional, feudal structures. The new bureucrats and technocrats (the Positivists and Social Darwinists) provided the ideology necessary for the concentration of capital and the coordination of local big landowners with central political power.

Agriculture, subsumed by capital was creating an increasing class of rural proletarians consisting of landless peasants, unemployed or farm workers alongside peons and immiserated Indian communeros. On the other hand, small-scale land owners became increasingly disadvantaged with the onset of large-scale units of production. The working class, concentrated in the north because of the high degree of investment there, consisted of independent artisans, the main body of the industrial proletariat and a relatively better paid skilled section. The artisans taking one blow after the another over a period of time gradually united with the rest of the workers who, in their turn, took to strike action or more violent revolts which were ruthlessly crushed.

The edifice of the Porfiriato started to shake due to a multiform discontent reflecting different and conflicting interests which later took the form of an armed revolt. The conflict within the bourgeoisie between its (mainly northern) industrial-financial sector and the more traditional, local big landowners, a conflict which represented the antithesis of the bourgeois-democratic project to oligarchy and authoritarianism; the discontent of the petite-bourgeoisie in the face of the monopolies; the rage of the proletariat and the communeros and the ambitions of the intellectuals who were suffocated within the repressive regime were the basic reasons for the explosion which followed.

Emanating from the modern industrial-financial bourgeoisie, Madero came to power supported by Villa, his initial admirer, and Zapata. The latter, an uncompromising fighter for agrarian reform, faced with Madero's "betrayal" (i.e. his loyal adherence to his class) called for the continuation of the revolution, issuing in November 1911, his Ayala Plan (4). Against General Huerta's dictatorship (1913-14) a loosely united front was formed consisting of three forces: Zapatistas in the south, composed mainly of ejidatarios or landless peasants with a communal social tradition, Villa's army in the north composed chiefly of petite-bourgeois and proletarians and the Constitutionalists who represented the middle-classes, some landlords and even some proletarians and peasants who believed in their socialist propaganda (5). The Convention at Aguascalientes in 1914, where these three armies met, proved the impossibility of their alliance.

Beside the legendary figures of a controversial Villa, and a fervent Emiliano Zapata whose indomitable proletarian consciousness combined a romantic nationalism with faith in a democratic government which would make real the popular vision of revolutionary change and agrarian reform, the internationalist, anarcho-communism of Ricardo Flores Magon stands out. Starting as a liberal, Magon gradually formed his anarchist ideas (which for tactical purposes he did not openly declare until 1910) and tried to turn the political revolution into a social revolution. Organizing strikes and revolts, influencing and agitating amongst workers and peasants mainly in northern Mexico (and having taken over the northern part of the state of Baja California) the Mexican Liberal Party (the PLM) founded by Magon, not only ignited many land expropriations and seizures of the means of production but also gave such actions a clear communist perspective, as can be seen in the 1911 manifesto.

The outcome of the class war was determined by the alliance made between the powerful workers' union, the Casa del Obrero Mundial (espousing an anarcho-syndicalist and corporate socialist ideology) and the Constitutionalists in exchange for promises of financial support and the satisfaction of some demands of the workers. Among the motives of the workersÆ class alliance one cannot ignore their discontent with Zapatistas' religiosity and Villistas' brutality, whose increasing militarism had turned them into professional soldiers.

After the crushing of the Zapatistas, the Villistas and the PLM, the 1917 constitution crystallized the dominant nationalist, anti-imperialist and socialist/populist ideology of the post-revolutionary Mexican state (6). Some of its reformist articles which provided for anti-clerical measures, agrarian reform and labour rights had constituted part of the 1906 programme of the PLM. It was the triumph of the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie over the peasants and workers and, ever since, it would make use of the content of the revolution in its own interests.

The enslavement of the working class by the state through limited concessions inaugurated a long practice of populism combined with repression and submission to the state. Alongside a defeated peasantry and a crippled working class an expanding petite-bourgeoisie started forming which benefited from state priviliges. During the Revolution military men, bureaucrats, intellectuals and union leaders emerged, who later staffed the new state mechanism. This new bourgeois-bureaucratic state was legitimized with "Revolution" as its ideological banner recuperating and distorting its content. "Revolution" as a myth became the unifying ideology of the state domination in the 20th century.

...TO THE MODERN STATE
"We want a liberal, democratic and nationalist government...the concesssions to labour are granted within the economic possibilities of the capitalist sector". Lazaro Cardenas

When the sound of the last revolutionary guns had died away, the Mexican state faced the double need of its reinforcement and capitalist development. The problem of controlling foreign capital (setting up the Banco de Mexico was the first act of co-operation between Mexican and foreign capital) and the class struggle that constantly intensified in the face of state manipulation, together with the corruption of the official labour leaders and the 1929 crisis, meant things couldnÆt wait any longer. The still unfulfilled promises of the Mexican Revolution threatened the legitimacy of the successive governments and the state in general as a vehicle of its ideology.

With Lazaro Cardenas' "socialistic" rhetoric and populist practises, in 1934 Mexico enters the period of state-regulated capitalism, a strategy already in use in America and Europe. The necessity of reformism which meant concessions to peasants and workers, nationalisations of selected sectors, redefinition of the conditions of the imperialist intervention, discipline of the recalcitrant unproductive landlords and "comprador" bourgeoisie heightened the "popular" role of the state. At the same time it satisfied the interests of the modern bourgeoisie.

The "politics of the masses" consolidated the corporate state that absorbed "Civil Society". The strengthened national political party (7) has acted ever since as a powerful administrative committee organizing and dividing society into separate constituencies that depend on it; class struggle became "legalized" through the recognition of the labour movement as an official, national one: the powerful until today CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers) was formed. CNC (National Peasant Confederation) was also formed and the "popular sector" of the party consisted of state employee unions, women's and youth organisations.

The consolidation of the democratic-capitalist ideology of the "common interest" became possible through the creation of a climate of "national unity" thanks to Cardenas' "anti-imperialist" politics. This climate reached its height when the mainly American and English-controlled oilfields were expropriated in 1938. The limited agrarian reform laid the basis for state-regulated capitalist agriculture. Land redistribution (through the expropriation of many unproductive latifundias) and the granting of state credits aimed at aiding small private farms so that the national market could be expanded. However, the intention was the support of the largest and most productive landholdings under state regulation. In 1940, at the end of Cardenas' presidency, his "socialist" politics had produced the following results regarding agricultural production: over 60% of the peasants were either landless or owners of inadequate plots of lands or ejidatarios trying to compete with big owners of fertile lands, capital and technology. Ejidatarios were forced gradually to let their holdings to those big landowners and work the land on their behalf. This led to the flourishing of neolatifundismo precisely in those areas of agrarian reform.

In general, during Cardenas's period the basis of the modern state was laid blunting class conflicts through the combined social-patriotic politics of concessions and repression. Starting in this period, the practise of populism and corporativism would form a historical continuity on the state and ideological level that holds until now.

BETWEEN THE SCYLLA OF CAPITAL AND THE CHARYBDIS OF IDEOLOGY
Cardenas' reforms and the modernization of capitalist development soon bore fruit. The twenty year period (1940-1960), just before the tumultuous appearance of the first threatening radical movements, is the one with the biggest and most rapid capital accumulation. The role of the state becoming more and more authoritarian and technocratic is crucial to this concentration of capital. Industrialization took a different course from the still colonized economies of Latin America (8).

With the "Green Revolution" there begins the modernization of agricultural production, which increaces six-fold between 1940 and 1975. The programmes of the "Green Revolution" (a capitalist rationalization) financed by the World Bank (and initially by the Rockfeller Foundation) expressed the state's need both to control the fragile social relations in the countryside and to organize a cheap food supply for the hordes of the proletarians in the cities. This process took place not only in Mexico but also in other countries where the agrarian question was vital (India for example). Initially, regions in the north were selected where "revolutionary" landlords possessed vast quantities of land (10). A series of loans to pay for modern technological input (from irrigation to chemical fertilizers) caused not only the intensification of cultivation and the increase of productivity but also the replacement of traditional crops with new ones for export. The onerous terms of credits for the aquisition of the means of production led ejidatarios or minifundistas (small-scale landholders) to immiseration or to bankruptcy. Many got forced off their land, becoming part of the "surplus population" known since the first enclosures in history and always present when "agrarian reform" takes place, becoming suitable for multiple purposes: as a reserve army, as an industrial proletariat, or, as land labourers. Besides the forced land expropriations, which added to the possessions of the landlords, another usual practice was the periodical parcelization of ejidos. This functioned as an absorber of social unrest since it maintained the idea of revolutionary land disribution.

On the whole the state's ability to present itself as a guardian of the ideas of the Mexican Revolution explains the relative political stability of the decades after the "pioneer" CardenasÆ presidency as well as the recuperation of the social movements. The revolutionary heritage of the peasants and the workers was taught through the state educational system and the state invoked it as its own mother and that's why it assumed the role of its defender (10). When the proletarians did not content themselves with state recognition of their contribution to the making of a "powerful, independent" state and showed vigorously their ingratitude they were turned automatically into "enemies of the Revolution" and "anti-patriots". However, the systematic propaganda of the national-democratic advances gave results: many peasants, workers, petite-bourgeois believed that the big trade unions CTM, CNC and the "popular sector" really represented them.

Interchanging with the unitary ideology of national interest, class harmony and populism other divisive ideologies dominate Mexican society: Indianism (Indigenismo) and that patriarchical Mexican inclination towards machismo. Saint, whore and cheap worker are the three basic roles the Mexican woman is called upon to assume (whereas Mexican capitalism promotes feminism, at the same time, sexism is reinforced -a common practice everywhere).

Indianism, the official recognition of the Indian heritage, was one of the contradictory achievements of the Revolution. It holds a central place in Mexican nationalism (all too often the invocation of the Indian heritage is overestimated as against the dominant mestizo composition of the Mexican people or conflicts with the more conservative, pro-Spanish religious tendencies). Behind the hypocritical ideological mask of the "national heritage", that runs through Mexican history, there lies the state effort to destroy and assimilate the Indian culture within the national commodity economy. Since 1948, INI (National Indian Institute) serves as a channel for the legalization of Indians' exploitation by caciques (11), bosses, recruiters of migrant labourers, moneylenders, merchants, landlords and their thugs. According to anthropologist Marcela Lagarde "INI programmes are directed and planned by anthropologists who proclaim themselves to be for the Indian, but whose end is that he cease to be one" (see Cockroft, p. 147-148).

In January 1994, in the south eastern state of Chiapas in Mexico, news of the Zapatistas armed revolt composed mainly of Indian peasants, travelled all over the world bringing about an explosion of interest and information on Mexico because the rebellion was automatically connected with the Mexican revolution. In this text we undertake an analysis of the class struggles in Mexico since the beginning of the century up till now, which includes a critical presentation of the guerilla movement of the Zapatistas. Among last year's events, a presentation of the "National Democratic Convention" was decided upon, not only because its character transcends the boundaries of Chiapas but also because it is indicative of the political direction of the class struggle. More than a year later nothing has been concluded. Whereas the Zapatistas still constitute a considerable force, the recent devaluation of the peso and the attempted military repression of the movement, has created a deeper crisis of class relations in Mexico.

The following analysis is from a viewpoint which goes beyond the outdated anti-imperialist distinctions of a "First World" and a "Third World". The Capitalist International, the only class unfortunately that has the clearest class consciousness, has seen to that. This class wouldn't have won until now if it hadn't imposed itself on "underdeveloped" and "developed" countries simultaneously. Because to every privatization in West Europe there corresponds a new wave of immigrants from East Europe; to every temp worker there's a former "priviliged" one and to every homeless person in North America there's a landless peasant in South America. It is against this class that the Chiapas ejidatarios rebel, and their struggle has a universal dimension which transcends south east Mexico. It's in fact the same struggle that takes place everywhere already, with different intensity and forms, against immiseration and alienation. If we have managed to show this, then we think we have contributed not only to the Chiapanecos' fight, but to our own.

THE NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION (CONVENTION NATIONAL DEMOCRATICA-CND), SAN CRISTOBAL, CHIAPAS - AGUASCALIENTES, LACANDONA JUNGLE, 6-9 August 1994.

"Zapata vive, la lucha sigue!"
In June 1994 in their Second Declaration from the Lacandona Jungle, the EZLN addressed an invitation to the National Democratic Convention for the purpose of introducing propositions about a transitional government and a new constitution. EZLN's sub-commander Marcos intensified his letter-writing mania inviting Mexican personalities within the left and center-left spectrum. Due to the Zapatista's appeal to "Civil Society" the range of those who finally participated was quite big: non-government organisations in general, leaders of peasant and Indian organisations, members of "independent parties", a few academics, union delegates, feminists, a few businessmen, lesbians, homosexuals, members of organisations in defense of the vote and naturally journalists or fake journalists (like myself). The organising committee of the CND consisted of Zapatistas delegates and various other organisations (the "Caravan of the Caravans", the "Chiapanecos Assembly for Democracy" etc with a dominant view in favour of the elections).

On Saturday 6th of August in San Cristobal Mesas-workshops were formed to discuss the "peaceful transition to democracy, the elections, the formation of a National Project and the defense of the vote". In spite of the great majority of supporters of the oppositional PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) and the prevalent tendency in favour of the elections there was a general distrust of the parties and a minority (1) against the elections and in favour of the formation of a National People's Assembly --a Transitional Government-- consisting of peasants, workers and Indians.

Among the demands of the Mesas (to which the majority agreed) the following ones were included: Salinas' resignation, expulsion of members of the PRI (Patry of Institutional Revolution, the government party) from administrative posts, mobilisation against a possible electoral fraud, political trial of Salinas, electoral reform for the representation of the Indians and all the ethnic groups, recognition of the EZLN as a belligerent force, breaking up the system of National Security, non-assumption of office of any candidates in case of high abstention, expulsion of the army from the states of Chiapas, Guerrero amd Michoacan and satisfaction of the 11 demands of the EZLN. All were almost devoutly accepted by the Mesas. The same atmosphere of confusion, recrimination, vexation and euphoria that prevailed on Saturday evening in San Cristobal with thousands of people bustling in and out of the Mesas and discussing in circles in the streets while songs were heard (and tourists were complaining about the sudden lack of rooms) would prevail even more intensely in the jungle.

6 or 7 thousand people -in hundreds of buses- in the drive towards Aguascalientes (2) passed through Mexican army outposts and then through regions controlled by the Zapatistas. Swarms of clapping and cheering Indians could be seen everywhere along the road, many of those holding posters of Zapata and placards with slogans in favour of fair elections.

During the descent to the jungle enthusiasm gave way to exhaustion (the last ones to arrive in Aguascalientes had journeyed for about 24 hours) and then the excitement on first contacting the Zapatistas at their outpost. At last in Aguascalientes Fitzcarraldo's Ship came into view: for 28 days, 600 Zapatistas had constructed this gigantic amphitheatre, made of tree trunks and covered by a huge tent, surrounded by hundreds of smaller tents. Above the stage two Mexican flags were hanging, behind it the honoured guests were seated and the place was full of posters with subjects from the Mexican Revolution. There was a colourful and diverse crowd from elderly, veteran co-fighters of Emiliano Zapata's original army, to young punks, to contemporary armed Zapatistas scattered all over, to reporters armed with cameras; all in an atmosphere of confusion, exuberance, turmoil and comings and goings beneath the hot tropical sun. Angry protests were caused when a mural appeared on the stage depicting Marcos and Zapata on horseback shaking hands and beneath them Cardenas with the bishop of Chiapas Samuel Ruiz (3). Protests from many sides led to the withdrawal of the painting.

Around evening Marcos' appearence on stage set off an outburst of chanting: "Marcos, our friend, the people are with you!", "Transitional Government and a new constitution", "Long live Ramona and Ana Maria" (women Zapatistas), "Long live Self-government by the Indians", "Let the National Convention be an electoral force" but by way of a reply: "All against the electoral farce". Songs about Zapata could be heard as well as the guevarist anthem of the 70's "Dressed in olive green, politically alive, comrade, you haven't died, we'll take revenge for your death". Marcos announced the presiding committee of the CND and called upon commander Tacho to speak, who declared that the EZLN give Aguascalientes over to the CND. He also presented the people's committees of the EZLN, the civil guards, Indian women, men and children with scarves on their faces and staves in their hands -one of the most touching moments of the Convention. Afterwards, Marcos presented the EZLN army, whose gun-barrels had white bands around them, indicating that "these guns are not to confront the "Civil Society", but paradoxically, they wish to become useless". Marcos' speech, a mixture of sentimentalism, patriotism, poetry and populism was received reverentially and in dead silence by the audience. After exulting at the large CND attendance, Marcos went on: "thanks to the EZLN having mobilized parts of society which had until recently been sunk in apathy and inability to get over their localisms", he made clear that the EZLN, "(do not expect from the CND) a civil arm... a civil pretext for war...or for submission...nor the dubious honour of a historical vanguard, of the numerous vanguards that made us suffer... We expect from the CND the opportunity to search for and find those to whom we will hand over the flag that we found deserted and forgotten in the palaces of power... To struggle so that all Mexicans will recognize it as their own, to become the national flag again, your flag, companeros... We hope that there will be enough maturity at this CND, so that this place will not be converted into a terrain for settling internal accounts, something sterile and emasculated... We are moving aside but we are not leaving. We hope that the horizon will open up so that we will not be necessary anymore, we the dead since always, who have to die again in order to live. We hope that this CND will give us an opportunity, the opportunity we were denied by those who govern this country, to return to our subterranean life with dignity after we have fulfilled our duty. The opportunity to return to silence, to the night out of which we came, to the death we lived in, the opportunity to disappear in the same way we appeared, one morning, without a face, without future. To return to the depths of history, of the dream, of the mountains..."

Amidst a deluge of applause, Marcos left the stage giving the Mexican flag to Rosario Ibarra (president of the CND and the FNCR, National Front Against Repression, a leftist organisation). These moments of patriotic effusions were soon followed by a real storm; a tropical rain storm that swept over everything. Despite the witticisms subverting the original slogans: "Zapata lives, the struggle goes on" becoming, 'Zapata lives, the rain goes on" -and the few brave ones who half-naked were sloshing about in the mud- it meant the sudden end of the first day of the CND in the jungle. The next day after several participants gave speeches that were no more than greetings and a minimal agreement on mobilizations against a possible election fraud was finalized, there followed Marcos' press conference. Confident like a pop star and evasive like a politician, he answered various questions ironically. He expressed again the EZLN's wish for a dignified peace and to make efforts to contact other guerilla armies in the country. To his question if he would take off his mask, Marcos replied, "Yes, if you want it. You tell me". The cries of "NO!" confirmed that the Marcos symbol should remain masked in order to preserve the legend and, in no way, becoming an ordinary, recognizable mortal.

So, in this mish mash of people; in this "Civil Society" in a festive and tense atmosphere somewhere between a rave-up and a political meeting; in this National Convention that wasn't really much of a convention at all, there actually was confirmed a vague and abstract will for "change", "democracy" and "peace". It was a symbolic gesture just before the elections. A manifestation of patriotism and reformism, contradictory expectations and general promises amidst the loud "Viva!".

FROM THE REVOLUTION (1910-1920) ...
"You take Revolucion to the end, turn right and you are on Reforma".
- Mexican joke referring to the streets one takes to reach Downtown Mexico City.

At the end of the previous century the Porfiriato, Diaz's dictatorship, combined an expanding capitalist growth with an oligarchic-dictatorial state. Capital's dominance through domestic and foreign monopolies, the centralisation of economy and political power on a national scale caused the gradual disintegration of the old traditional, feudal structures. The new bureucrats and technocrats (the Positivists and Social Darwinists) provided the ideology necessary for the concentration of capital and the coordination of local big landowners with central political power.

Agriculture, subsumed by capital was creating an increasing class of rural proletarians consisting of landless peasants, unemployed or farm workers alongside peons and immiserated Indian communeros. On the other hand, small-scale land owners became increasingly disadvantaged with the onset of large-scale units of production. The working class, concentrated in the north because of the high degree of investment there, consisted of independent artisans, the main body of the industrial proletariat and a relatively better paid skilled section. The artisans taking one blow after the another over a period of time gradually united with the rest of the workers who, in their turn, took to strike action or more violent revolts which were ruthlessly crushed.

The edifice of the Porfiriato started to shake due to a multiform discontent reflecting different and conflicting interests which later took the form of an armed revolt. The conflict within the bourgeoisie between its (mainly northern) industrial-financial sector and the more traditional, local big landowners, a conflict which represented the antithesis of the bourgeois-democratic project to oligarchy and authoritarianism; the discontent of the petite-bourgeoisie in the face of the monopolies; the rage of the proletariat and the communeros and the ambitions of the intellectuals who were suffocated within the repressive regime were the basic reasons for the explosion which followed.

Emanating from the modern industrial-financial bourgeoisie, Madero came to power supported by Villa, his initial admirer, and [Emiliano] Zapata. The latter, an uncompromising fighter for agrarian reform, faced with Madero's "betrayal" (i.e. his loyal adherence to his class) called for the continuation of the revolution, issuing in November 1911, his Ayala Plan (4). Against General Huerta's dictatorship (1913-14) a loosely united front was formed consisting of three forces: Zapatistas in the south, composed mainly of ejidatarios or landless peasants with a communal social tradition, Villa's army in the north composed chiefly of petite-bourgeois and proletarians and the Constitutionalists who represented the middle-classes, some landlords and even some proletarians and peasants who believed in their socialist propaganda (5). The Convention at Aguascalientes in 1914, where these three armies met, proved the impossibility of their alliance.

Beside the legendary figures of a controversial Villa, and a fervent Emiliano Zapata whose indomitable proletarian consciousness combined a romantic nationalism with faith in a democratic government which would make real the popular vision of revolutionary change and agrarian reform, the internationalist, anarcho-communism of Ricardo Flores Magon stands out. Starting as a liberal, Magon gradually formed his anarchist ideas (which for tactical purposes he did not openly declare until 1910) and tried to turn the political revolution into a social revolution. Organizing strikes and revolts, influencing and agitating amongst workers and peasants mainly in northern Mexico (and having taken over the northern part of the state of Baja California) the Mexican Liberal Party (the PLM) founded by Magon, not only ignited many land expropriations and seizures of the means of production but also gave such actions a clear communist perspective, as can be seen in the 1911 manifesto.

The outcome of the class war was determined by the alliance made between the powerful workers' union, the Casa del Obrero Mundial (espousing an anarcho-syndicalist and corporate socialist ideology) and the Constitutionalists in exchange for promises of financial support and the satisfaction of some demands of the workers. Among the motives of the workers' class alliance one cannot ignore their discontent with Zapatistas' religiosity and Villistas' brutality, whose increasing militarism had turned them into professional soldiers.

After the crushing of the Zapatistas, the Villistas and the PLM, the 1917 constitution crystallized the dominant nationalist, anti-imperialist and socialist/populist ideology of the post-revolutionary Mexican state (6). Some of its reformist articles which provided for anti-clerical measures, agrarian reform and labour rights had constituted part of the 1906 programme of the PLM. It was the triumph of the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie over the peasants and workers and, ever since, it would make use of the content of the revolution in its own interests.

The enslavement of the working class by the state through limited concessions inaugurated a long practice of populism combined with repression and submission to the state. Alongside a defeated peasantry and a crippled working class an expanding petite-bourgeoisie started forming which benefited from state priviliges. During the Revolution military men, bureaucrats, intellectuals and union leaders emerged, who later staffed the new state mechanism. This new bourgeois-bureaucratic state was legitimized with "Revolution" as its ideological banner recuperating and distorting its content. "Revolution" as a myth became the unifying ideology of the state domination in the 20th century.

...TO THE MODERN STATE
"We want a liberal, democratic and nationalist government...the concesssions to labour are granted within the economic possibilities of the capitalist sector" - Lazaro Cardenas
When the sound of the last revolutionary guns had died away, the Mexican state faced the double need of its reinforcement and capitalist development. The problem of controlling foreign capital (setting up the Banco de Mexico was the first act of co-operation between Mexican and foreign capital) and the class struggle that constantly intensified in the face of state manipulation, together with the corruption of the official labour leaders and the 1929 crisis, meant things couldn't wait any longer. The still unfulfilled promises of the Mexican Revolution threatened the legitimacy of the successive governments and the state in general as a vehicle of its ideology.

With Lazaro Cardenas' "socialistic" rhetoric and populist practises, in 1934 Mexico enters the period of state-regulated capitalism, a strategy already in use in America and Europe. The necessity of reformism which meant concessions to peasants and workers, nationalisations of selected sectors, redefinition of the conditions of the imperialist intervention, discipline of the recalcitrant unproductive landlords and "comprador" bourgeoisie heightened the "popular" role of the state. At the same time it satisfied the interests of the modern bourgeoisie.

The "politics of the masses" consolidated the corporate state that absorbed "Civil Society". The strengthened national political party (7) has acted ever since as a powerful administrative committee organizing and dividing society into separate constituencies that depend on it; class struggle became "legalized" through the recognition of the labour movement as an official, national one: the powerful until today CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers) was formed. CNC (National Peasant Confederation) was also formed and the "popular sector" of the party consisted of state employee unions, women's and youth organisations.

The consolidation of the democratic-capitalist ideology of the "common interest" became possible through the creation of a climate of "national unity" thanks to Cardenas' "anti-imperialist" politics. This climate reached its height when the mainly American and English-controlled oilfields were expropriated in 1938. The limited agrarian reform laid the basis for state-regulated capitalist agriculture. Land redistribution (through the expropriation of many unproductive latifundias) and the granting of state credits aimed at aiding small private farms so that the national market could be expanded. However, the intention was the support of the largest and most productive landholdings under state regulation. In 1940, at the end of Cardenas' presidency, his "socialist" politics had produced the following results regarding agricultural production: over 60% of the peasants were either landless or owners of inadequate plots of lands or ejidatarios trying to compete with big owners of fertile lands, capital and technology. Ejidatarios were forced gradually to let their holdings to those big landowners and work the land on their behalf. This led to the flourishing of neolatifundismo precisely in those areas of agrarian reform.

In general, during Cardenas's period the basis of the modern state was laid blunting class conflicts through the combined social-patriotic politics of concessions and repression. Starting in this period, the practise of populism and corporativism would form a historical continuity on the state and ideological level that holds until now.

BETWEEN THE SCYLLA OF CAPITAL AND THE CHARYBDIS OF IDEOLOGY
Cardenas' reforms and the modernization of capitalist development soon bore fruit. The twenty year period (1940-1960), just before the tumultuous appearance of the first threatening radical movements, is the one with the biggest and most rapid capital accumulation. The role of the state becoming more and more authoritarian and technocratic is crucial to this concentration of capital. Industrialization took a different course from the still colonized economies of Latin America (8).

With the "Green Revolution" there begins the modernization of agricultural production, which increaces six-fold between 1940 and 1975. The programmes of the "Green Revolution" (a capitalist rationalization) financed by the World Bank (and initially by the Rockfeller Foundation) expressed the state's need both to control the fragile social relations in the countryside and to organize a cheap food supply for the hordes of the proletarians in the cities. This process took place not only in Mexico but also in other countries where the agrarian question was vital (India for example). Initially, regions in the north were selected where "revolutionary" landlords possessed vast quantities of land (10). A series of loans to pay for modern technological input (from irrigation to chemical fertilizers) caused not only the intensification of cultivation and the increase of productivity but also the replacement of traditional crops with new ones for export. The onerous terms of credits for the aquisition of the means of production led ejidatarios or minifundistas (small-scale landholders) to immiseration or to bankruptcy. Many got forced off their land, becoming part of the "surplus population" known since the first enclosures in history and always present when "agrarian reform" takes place, becoming suitable for multiple purposes: as a reserve army, as an industrial proletariat, or, as land labourers. Besides the forced land expropriations, which added to the possessions of the landlords, another usual practice was the periodical parcelization of ejidos. This functioned as an absorber of social unrest since it maintained the idea of revolutionary land disribution.

On the whole the state's ability to present itself as a guardian of the ideas of the Mexican Revolution explains the relative political stability of the decades after the "pioneer" Cardenas' presidency as well as the recuperation of the social movements. The revolutionary heritage of the peasants and the workers was taught through the state educational system and the state invoked it as its own mother and that's why it assumed the role of its defender (10). When the proletarians did not content themselves with state recognition of their contribution to the making of a "powerful, independent" state and showed vigorously their ingratitude they were turned automatically into "enemies of the Revolution" and "anti-patriots". However, the systematic propaganda of the national-democratic advances gave results: many peasants, workers, petite-bourgeois believed that the big trade unions CTM, CNC and the "popular sector" really represented them.

Interchanging with the unitary ideology of national interest, class harmony and populism other divisive ideologies dominate Mexican society: Indianism (Indigenismo) and that patriarchical Mexican inclination towards machismo. Saint, whore and cheap worker are the three basic roles the Mexican woman is called upon to assume (whereas Mexican capitalism promotes feminism, at the same time, sexism is reinforced -a common practice everywhere).

Indianism, the official recognition of the Indian heritage, was one of the contradictory achievements of the Revolution. It holds a central place in Mexican nationalism (all too often the invocation of the Indian heritage is overestimated as against the dominant mestizo composition of the Mexican people or conflicts with the more conservative, pro-Spanish religious tendencies). Behind the hypocritical ideological mask of the "national heritage", that runs through Mexican history, there lies the state effort to destroy and assimilate the Indian culture within the national commodity economy. Since 1948, INI (National Indian Institute) serves as a channel for the legalization of Indians' exploitation by caciques (11), bosses, recruiters of migrant labourers, moneylenders, merchants, landlords and their thugs. According to anthropologist Marcela Lagarde "INI programmes are directed and planned by anthropologists who proclaim themselves to be for the Indian, but whose end is that he cease to be one" (see Cockroft, p. 147-148).

LOS OLVIDADOS - DECOMPOSITION AND RECOMPOSITION OF THE PROLETARIAT
Rapid industrialization and domestic immigration after 1950 gradually meant the urban proletariat assuming a central role in class struggle increasing its industrial share to 25% of the economically active population. Altogether, the total of salaried workers rose from 46% in 1950 to 75% in 1982. With less than quarter of wage labourers unionized and with the "comparative advantage" of extremely low wages (only after wildcat strikes in 1974, did wages manage to exceed to a great extent their 1939 level, only to come tumbling down again after 1976) Mexican capitalism reproduces accumulation at one pole and misery at the other.

The first wave of strikes between 1958 and 1962 mainly in the public sector (railways, petroleum) sparked resistance in other sectors (education, agriculture) and ridiculed various marxist drivel about an "underdeveloped third-world" proletariat. It also forced international capital to invest in new sectors (the auto-industry) initially in Mexico City and then in the north - in the same way Detroit had been previously abandoned - when it confronted the workers' insurgence in the 70's reinforcing the industrial zone of the maquiladora camps (12).

Through compulsory or "legal" land expropriations landless peasants swarm into the cities, particularly the capital. A vast lumpen-proletariat composed of unemployed, underemployed and temporary workers is constantly moving within the agricultural, industrial, commercial and service sectors. While this perpetual mobility brings on the one hand workers in the black economy closer to the unionized ones, on the other hand, it undermines the benefits of the better organized industrial proletariat.

Olvidados (the forgotten ones), those crowded in the "lost cities" of Mexico City, in the colonias proletarias (in the larger metropolitan area of Mexico City half the population lives in these slums), work mainly in small owners' workshops, in hundreds of thousands small sweatshops assembling furniture, and making shoes, clothing etc. Capital controls them both through the supply of raw materials and the sale of the finished products. These workshops are more profitable for capital because the wages are extremely low and the splintering of the workers does not allow for any organized resistance. In 1970, the World Bank programmes "Investments in the Poor" tried through credits to further integrate these neighbourhood workshops into monopoly capital.

The state role in the geographical concentration of this lumpen-proletariat and in the organization of its political behaviour (manipulating the leaders of community movements) was always vital: it regulated its local markets, it organized a phoney petite-bourgeois network of petty-trade and it provided for rudimentary social services (state-run cheap food stores, minimal health care, schemes of land and housing distribution to the homeless etc).

However, the subjective dimension of the recomposition of the proletarians must not be ignored. A general class culture is constantly confirmed either through riots or other dynamic mobilizations. A relatively recent example is Tepito slum, in the centre of Mexico City: after the earthquake in 1985 the inhabitants formed autonomous organizations, occupied their rented houses and forced the government to withdraw its development plans aimed at the gentrification of the area and consequently their evacuation. Tepitanos, known for their outdoor festivals, their everyday practical refusal of work, their solidarity and their communal traditions proved that the colonias proletarias are sometimes disfunctional for the state. That's why when the recuperative practice comes to a deadlock, BARAREM arrives (paramilitary assault squad specialized in driving off "land invaders"). (13)

INSURGENCIA OBRERA - WORKERS' INSURGENCY 1973-1977
At the end of the 60's, a student/youth rebellion began expressing a belief (to the very letter) in the nationalist ideology taught in schools and propagandized by the PRI. Zapata, Magon and Cardenas became symbols of a "national change" which was made materially visible only in the form of statues and busts in plazas everywhere. The end of the student democratic movement came with the massacre in the Plaza of Three Cultures in Mexico City on the 2nd of October in 1968. The participation of many proletarians and peasants in that drenched in blood demonstration (perhaps there were about 500 dead protesters) was an indication of the insurgency that was soon to follow. Guevarism was also a very widespread ideology at the beginning of the 70's and was the basic inspiration behind many urban guerilla groups which by 1975 had been broken up.

Despite some limited populist reforms during the early Echeverria presidency (1970-1976) the industrial proletariat starting turning against the state union leaders, the so-called charros. We are talking about relatively well-paid, militant workers concentrated massively in state industrial sectors, that formed the reformist "Democratic Tendency" within the CTM. During this period the first independent unions emerged chiefly in the automobile sector (some of which were recuperated in the early 80's and their leaders became like a red rag to a bull for the coming radical rank and file movement). A series of wildcat strikes spread a spirit of struggle, on the one hand, in rural Mexico igniting land occupations and efforts at unionizing farm workers, and on the other hand, in metropolitan barrios inciting the marginal proletariat to angry mobilizations. In this period, with the "Democratic Tendency", acting as its spearhead, the workers' movement was hit by the inconsistency of its militancy vis-a-vis their respect for the "nation and the presidential institution". Also the army repression, the lay-offs and the austerity measures imposed by the state and the IMF (through a loan in 1976) and the 100% devaluation of the peso, meant the workers' movement died down only to give way to something new. On the other hand, the PRI was forced to meke political constitutional reforms in 1976 (legalizing the CP, increasing minority seats in the Chamber of Deputies to 100 and permitting opposition parties to participate in national elections) in its efforts to confine class struggle within the political arena and thus to disarm it.

THE UNBEARABLE "CLASSNESS" OF DEBT: DEBT CRISIS AS A CRISIS OF CLASS RELATIONS
Mexico was not of course the only field of class struggle in the 70's. In America and Europe (the eastern one included) wildcat strikes as well as the increasing refusal of work brought about the end of Keynesianism. The fuel of capital's counter-attack was oil, the so-called "energy crisis" of 1973. The planned increase in the price of oil paved the way for the simultaneous decomposition of the working class (the curtailment of the welfare state, wages cuts, unemployment) and recomposition of terrestrial capital accumulation (profiting energy multinationals, finance capital and the oil-exporting states). The recycling of petrodollars financed later the capitalist strategy of automation and introduction of high technology in industries in the west, and what is of importance here, petrodollars were the capital for the loans that generated later the debts (14). In the same period in Mexico capital flows in (through loans) for industrial expansion and the policing of the proletariat, especially after the massacre in 1968. The discovery of oil in Chiapas was of immense importance; Mexico becomes the Arabia of the Caribbean.

At the beginning of the 80's the resurgent class struggle in Mexico took on a more anti-state and anti-party character. Along with the loans working class demands for a slice of oil revenues increased. In early 1981, for the first time for many years, real wage hikes were gained that consequently led to a wider radicalization. Tensions within independent unions intensified and the official union leaders (charros) tried to outflank, though only verbally, the workers' militant demands. Threatened by the pressure of a rank and file movement they begged capitalists to give in stressing the importance of their role. "If we change tactics or abandon the workers to their luck, employers won't have time to realize what will happen: imagine a mob let loose on the streets, out of control", says Velasquez, CTM boss, in March 1982. Just a few months later, in August 1982, the change in international capital's strategy would dispel his apprehension.

What's widely known as "monetarism" or "Thatcherism" is a capitalist restructuring not based on the previous decade's "energy crisis" but on the "debt crisis". Interest rate increases, the investment strike and austerity measures in western economies bringing about a downturn in world trade as well as a decline in the price of oil after 1979, caused Mexico's debt (together with other countries) to increase astronomically. The Mexican government declared a moratorium on the repayment of debts inaugurating the international "debt crisis". The role of the IMF from Africa to Asia becomes decisive: the vicious circle of loans and debts (new loans for the repayment of the old ones) is accompanied with the World Bank's "Structural Adjustment Programmes" which is the more decent name of the restructuring of class relations through privatizations, unemployment, austerity and immiseration. Between 1982 and 1984, 66 countries of the so-called Third World agreed to austerity programmes imposed by the IMF with a pretext about the "restoration of the balance of payments". In essence it is a new political strategy for the reorganization of the relations between international capital and nation-states and the international decomposition of the proletariat. The "debt crisis" becomes a functional means for the control of national economies and capitalist discipline. The case of Mexico is a typical example, where the "debt crisis" caused a chain reaction: IMF intervention; the implementation of austerity programmes, to which the PRI technocrats adhered eagerly; severe cutbacks of the welfare state and encouraging the growth of the maquiladoras zones. This last one helped many north American industries transfer to the south causing the decomposition of both the Mexican and the American proletariat (for example, General Motors in December of 1991 planned to fire thousands of its American workers while at the same increasing the number of its workers in the maquiladora zone, blackmailing its remaining American workforce into accepting longer hours and lower wages).

The integration of Mexican capital with international capital imposes a restructuring of class relations and proves that the "debt crisis" is in effect a productive crisis and therefore, not an obstacle to capitalist development. Debt repayment which is presented as the objective is nothing more than an excuse for an attack on working class struggles and the violent restoration of self-sacrificial ethics in favour of "the national cause", starting, for example with the donation of 1% of workers' salaries to the government, as the CTM asked for in 1982 in chorus with some leftist parties. This practice characterizes the entire 80's decade until today blackmailing the consent to undermining the welfare state, to unemployment and privatizations, all packaged as solutions to the "national problem".

THE THEOLOGY OF NEOLIBERALISM
In the 80's, the prevalent technocratic PRI fraction implemented the IMF-dictated "Structural Adjustment Programmes" to the letter. Over 500 state corporations were privatized and until the early 90's less than 400 had remained under state administration. Some of the most important moments of capital's assault were the subjugation of the independent union at Uramex (state uranium corporation) in 1984, the closure of DINA-Renault in 1986 (after strikes against its privatization), lay-offs at the state oil corporation Pemex, the sale of the state telephone company Telemex, the restructuring of the textile industry... The two sectors of particular importance for the state are the automobile industry in the north (which presents the most rapid development worldwide) and oil in the south. What is notable about the class struggle during the 80's and the early 90's is the emergence of a young unskilled proletariat, not only because it became the main prey of restructuring plans but because of its struggle within some independent unions against the leadership. In Volkswagen, in 1992, a rank and file movement threw out the contract signed by the leadership of their independent union with management which had provided for new flexible work relations. A strike followed which after one month was finally defeated. The management had fired all 14,000 workers only to take them back on again minus 1,500 (who, "accidentally", were the most militant ones) having managed to impose even more unfavourable conditions.

In an attempt to recuperate and check the resurgent movements Salinas' government introduced a policy of concertation (reconciliation) tempting some independent unions to return to the CTM, having substituted some "particularly" corrupt charros, but resorting to violence as well, perhaps more than it wished to. According to the same practice of recuperation and control, PRONASOL (National Programme of Solidarity) was introduced in the late 80's funded by the World Bank and through the sale of Telemex and other former state corporations. This model of "restructuring with a human face" provides sums of money for cheap food, loans to peasants and women's micro-companies, funds for schools, university scholarships, property titles to urban squatters, construction of hospitals and funding infrastructure projects (roads, electrification, dams, draining of lakes etc).

Especially Chiapas in 1993 received more than 100 million dollars in grants. Apart from PRI's electoral benefits through this "decentralizing" methodology, the "participatory" character of these projects was promoted -projects virtually creating the necessary infrastructure paving the way for modern capitalist development in accordance to NAFTA- whereby poor peasants and workers are forced to work at a minimum cost to the state, thereby temporarily alleviating the most painful consequences of capitalist restructuring. Through PRONASOL, a wide spying network was also organised to immediately deal with any possible agrarian movements as it was practised through previous World Bank programmes (e.g. PIDER, c/f next chapter). In general it's part of a long-standing tradition of recuperation/exploitation by the Machiavellians of the PRI - these scientists of manipulation and repression.

The course taken by the PRI integrating the Mexican economy with international capital undermines its own ideological legitimacy: in 1992, article 27 of the constitution, which protected, inter alia, the right to possess a holding on communal land ,the ejidos, was modified. This modification of one of the most representative outcomes of the Mexican Revolution intensifies the ever constant proletarianization of the peasantry bringing with it the new enclosures.

RURAL MEXICO AND THE NEW ENCLOSURES
"Banco Rural is our patron (boss). We're the workers and we don't even get a wage or have a labour union" - a group of ejidatarios in Michoacan, 1981
Within the peasantry, the ejidatarios take the brunt of the assault of capitalist restructuring and are at the centre of class antagonism (setting in motion, now with the Zapatistas, an organized armed struggle). Ejidos are communal lands, mostly Indian, belonging to the community and the village (the pueblo). Their farming is collective - or was so formerly (15). This ancient Indian communal system (in which the collective cultivation, irrigation, harvesting and the widespread mutual aid was a rule) existed before colonialism and survived within the context of feudalism which was transplanted from Europe. The ejidos were small tracts of land on conquistadores' estates and out of the latter, throughout the generations, creole landowners (the hacendados) emerged who increasingly encroached on large parts of Indian land turning the ejidatarios into peons. The communal system continued to exist after Independence and the Mexican Revolution but, on the other hand, the number of rancheros - the independent small-scale farmers - increased, too. The ejidatarios or communeros were the social base of the Zapata movement, a source of inspiration for Magon and a reference point for Kropotkin in "Mutual Aid".

Article 27 of the 1917 constitution protects communal land and forbids ejidos' alienation and mortgage. This article also provides that it is within the discretion of the state to nationalize the lands. It authorizes all Mexican states to set a maximum limit to the amount of land owned by an individual or a co-operative. Moreover it protects private land. Since the beginning of the century, the ejidos were already divided into family holdings (today, less than 10% is collectively cultivated). Given the expansion of the capitalist agricultural production with the help of all governments, capitalist competition, the lack of technology, debts, the brutal force of the landowners' private armies and state compulsion (through loans or "modernization" programmes) the dwindling of the communal land is easily explained.

The various agrarian reforms have left the ejidatarios and the minifundistas with less than 30% of the cultivable land, mostly arid and less fertile. Of course, the official accounts raise the number to 43%. Today more than 80% of those who cultivate the 25,000 ejidos are, at the same time, self-employed, proletarians working as day-labourers for landlords, wandering about the country looking for a job, often forced into domestic migration or going abroad. At the same time there is a permanent rural proletariat that constitutes 12% of the workforce in the countryside.

The "Green Revolution" in the south was relatively delayed compared with the north. Until the 70's, the plan for the south was not development but maintaining less modern social relations whereby landlords were traditionally more interested in primary accumulation than pursuing one on an extended scale -rather reminiscent of the hacendados of the past century- and a mass of farm-labourers, peones, ejidatarios or small holders, often lived in abject poverty.

During the 70's, the World Bank initiated the "Investments in the Poor" project. The PIDER programme (the Integrated Programmes for Rural Development) established big agri-businesses, using peasant labour and financial technical input. "Traditional" Indian smallholders were subordinated to capital through a series of loans and the enforced cultivation of particular crops ready for cheap food processing for export. Their inability to pay off the debts led to the reduction of their land, while on the other hand they had to intensify their subsistence farming (16).

During the 80's, new World Bank programmes (LDA, SAM) approved by the state union of peasants (CNC) led to further expropriations of the ejidos by the large agri-businesses via promotion of the "collaboration" between landlords investing capital in the means of production and ejidatarios providing land and labour.

In the early 90's the most striking feature of rural Mexico is proletarianization and the simultaneous maintenance of subsistence farming and self-employment. Most ejidatarios cultivate their own land to sustain themselves, or on behalf of rentiers and work at the same time as land-labourers or engage in domestic handicraft. They are virtually proletarians disguised as peasants. However, the reform of article 27 in 1992 shows that even this state of semi-proletarian employment does not satisfy capital's demands. The ejidos, only in theory belonging to the ejidatarios, are now virtually expropriated (17). With the acceptance of the production norms set by NAFTA, even the memory of the slogan "The land to the tiller!" must be wiped out. The enclosures, which, according to Marx, constituted the basic process of primary capital accumulation marking the starting point of capitalism in England through forced land expropriations aiming at "liberating" the peasants from the means of production and thus becoming "free" wage workers, are still continuing. The new expropriators, the accountants of the IMF and the PRI, under the pretext of the repayment of the debts, dispossess the peasants of communal land rendering them landless and intensifying capitalist exploitation.

However, the state and capital wouldn't have been able to impose their control without the collaboration of caciquismo, the traditional system mediating social relations in the countryside. Caciques were the Indian leaders who cooperated with the colonialists. Nowadays, whether Indians or mestizos, they are usually political leaders or local magnates, intermediaries between the state and the peasants. The latter consider them as "capable" leaders, "servants of the people", and the caciques, giving out loans or doing "favours" using paternalistic and populist means, manage through political patronage and public relations to defuse or divert class antagonisms, obstructing the explosion of class consciousness and thus fostering state tutelage. Race often takes precedence over class (Indians against mestizos) sharpening internal antagonisms among the poor which are often worked on through the mediation of the caciques. Many agrarian movements and organizations promoting this ideology of "popular interest" ended up as arms of the state, through the co-optation of their charismatic leaders, who took advantage of their representative power over the peasants.

MORE FACTS ON THE STATE OF CHIAPAS
Chiapas differs from the rest of Mexico only in the degree of poverty afflicting the ejidatarios and the minifundistas. Poverty worsened due to the state development programmes introduced to exploit the natural resources of the state (timber, oil). On the other hand, since the mid-60's, 150,000 landless Indians (Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Chol, Sekema and Tojolabal) were allowed to settle and they were given the right to cultivate land in the Lacandona jungle. These tracts of cleared forestland were later bought or forcetaken by the rich landlords and the ranchers, or abandonded by the Indians themselves because the soil was unsuitable for long term cultivation.

The expansion and intensification of cattle ranching, logging and oil exploration in the 70's aggravated the competition for land and tens of thousands of peasants were pushed off their holdings and were turned into land-labourers. The situation worsened since the landlords hired temporary land-labourers from Guatemala, with even lower wages (especially in the mid-80's with the arrival of 80,000 Guatemalan refugees).

Efforts at social organization and resistance have been made by the church, inspired by Liberation Theology, and by a broad, rank and file union movement of teachers, the hijos de campesinos , the children of the peasants. In 1989 a decree banned forest exploration and the government eliminated coffee subsidies -just two other causes that added to Chiapas' increasing social tension. The implementation of PRONASOL didn't really ease things, although Chiapas served as a model for this "poverty alleviation" programme.

NAFTA, GATT AND WTO: JUST WHAT'S BEHIND THESE JARRING ACRONYMS?
Perhaps nowadays we are closer to the verification of Marx's theory about "the immiseration of the working class", "the universal competition among workers", "the expansion of the world market", "the mobility of the capacity to labour and the fluidity of capital", especially if we examine what the above-mentioned initials mean.

GATT and NAFTA's declaration re the "liberalization of trade" allows in other words, capital's unlimited liberty of movement and increased political control. Gatt, like the World Bank and the IMF is a Bretton Woods institution. Bretton Woods was the post second world war meeting place in 1944, of capital's representatives from the US, Britain, France and the USSR. Its intention was to coordinate efforts to avoid crises like the one in 1929 and inter-imperialist wars. GATT, formalized in 1948, has been modified a lot since then and effectively functions in more than 100 countries. The 8th round of the Negotiations took place in Uruguay in 1986 adding to GATT provisions which were rather more than simple tariff reductions. They impose rules which override national laws that regulate domestic markets and labour (environmental restrictions, collective bargaining, agricultural products subsidies) considering them as "trade barriers". The multinational corporations enjoy even more favourable terms for investing in countries where labour costs are lower and the environmental laws less restrictive.

NAFTA eliminates state subsidies for agricultural products and it is estimated that in Mexico 2 to 12 million jobs in agriculture will be lost, which will add to the migratory flow northwards. NAFTA (now effective between Canada, US and Mexico and intended to include many Latin American and Asian countries in the future) is virtually completing the process of global capital integration. Side agreements were made to give NAFTA a democratic facade: there were formed trinational labour and environmental commissions of state bureaucrats, charged with the settlement of disputes regarding the implementation of NAFTA provisions. However, labour laws concerning collective bargaining, the right to strike and unionize are not subject to these commissions' jurisdiction.

In this rock bottom race, capital will flow into Mexico as surely as the deindustrialization of America will continue (especially regarding car, textile and food industries). The PRI has already paved the way for capital's welcoming reception through the dismantling of the welfare state, unemployment, flexible work relations and the recent devaluation of the peso.

This devaluation, that took place a few days after the deployment of the Zapatistas in 38 communities in Chiapas, cannot be explained irrespectively of the fear of class struggle spreading in other areas of Mexico, and above all it is essentially connected with the general crisis in the country as we have described it so far. Monetary issues are nothing but the mystified form of social issues regarding production and wages. Capital is cutting wages on a national scale by devaluating the currency. This move is at the same time defensive and offensive. Offensive, because wage reductions and the further privatizations demanded as precondition for new loans, plus a 40% increase in interest rates which will bring about the collapse of a 30% of small and medium-size businesses, aim at creating better conditions for future investments. At the same time, the myth is spreading that state coffers are empty and that "sacrifices are necessary" for the repayment of the new loans.

More than a year after the implementation of NAFTA in Mexico, the process of restructuring is intensifying. 99% of the strikes in 1994 were declared either non-existant or illegal and in many cases lay-offs followed, mostly in the car, textile, iron and coal industries and in the maquiladoras sector.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is aiming at "achieving a greater coherence in global economic policy-making", according to its founding document (1986), along with the World Bank and the IMF. Having a "legal personality" the WTO will ensure the conformity and the integration of national economies within the global one according to the GATT rules.

Even talking about "national economic planning" is difficult since what is known as the Nation-State undergoes a serious crisis caused by the agreements and institutions of the Capitalist International. The expansion of the commodity economy -as a result of the defeat of class struggles over the previous decades- brings about decomposition of an intense kind for the Mexican and american proletariat and, in the future, (if it hasn't already) could result in capitalism forcing the abolition of borders, undermining the Nation-State. However, this undermining is inevitably damaging the representative capacities of the political bureaucracies. For example the PRI has not remained in power for 66 years as an elected representative of capital, but as an elected representative of "Civil Society", of the "Mexican nation". While pretending to be powerless to oppose the IMF and the World Bank it is forced to deflate its own nationalist blustering, to undermine its own nationalist foundation, to repeal gradually the constitution, the very source of its legitimacy. As a guardian of the "achievements" of the Mexican Revolution (in reality, the defeat of the peasants and workers as they themselves found out later, at the same time as some rights and demands were statutorily secured) and the populist measures of Cardenas, the PRI should seek the consent of "Mexican citizens" posing as providing for the "common interest" (18). Yet being forced to do this in ways less and less persuasive -especially since the days of the "debt crisis" and now with NAFTA- it is causing increasing disaffection. Within the PRI, the dominant technocratic faction, oriented towards integrating Mexican with global capital, is already being attacked by those factions hesitant about innovation; those that are "traditional", "corrupt" and "backward". The assasination of Colosio, who was in charge of PRONASOL, was followed by the assasination of Massieu, the general secretary of PRI -both close associates of the former president, Salinas.

Amidst these "sordid family quarrels" as Marx described inter-capitalist antagonisms, an uprising that started more than a year ago is continuing, carrying with "the wind picking up from below", all its weaknesses.

THE ZAPATISTAS WITHOUT A MYTH
The difficulty of analysing a movement like the Zapatistas is not only due to the fluidity of the situation in Chiapas. The very meaning of their words and tactics was gradually unfolding before our eyes as we were trying to connect it with their strategy and Mexican reality in general.

As a national-liberation army, with their First Declaration from Lacandona Jungle in December 1993, they declared war on the Mexican government ready to advance to the capital claiming, as Indians and Mexicans at the same time, their historical continuity with all national and popular struggles since Colonialism. They published then the "Revolutionary Laws of the Liberated Territories", their social and political programme. After the truce agreed by them and the national army on the 12th of January 1994, they sat down at the "dialogue" table with the government presenting their 34-points-demands with an emphasis on political demands of a national character. In mid-March they walked out of the negotiations publishing their Second Declaration from the Lacandona Jungle, in which, addressing the "Mexican people", they proposed a National Democratic Convention for the submission of "propositions about a transitional government and a new constitution".

The PRI under the pressure of the EZLN and the class struggle it had sparked off, suspended the Minister of the Interior and the governor of Chiapas and made a kind of electoral reform allowing for the presence of foreign observers during the elections held on the 21st of August. According to the official electoral results the PRI received 48% of the vote, the PRD 16% and the right-wing PAN 26%. In Chiapas, Eduerdo Robledo Rincon of the PRI "won" with 51% of the vote and the PRD-supported Amando Avendano followed with 34% having adopted the EZLN's 11-points. After the PRI's electoral victory, the EZLN denounced the fraud and called on people to engage in civil disobedience and mobilize in peaceful protest. Avendano formed a parallel government in December supported by a large part of the peasants in Chiapas, the EZLN themselves and the majority of the National Democratic Convention, which at its second meeting in October, demanded the termination of the PRI government. Bishop Ruiz formed CONAI (National Commission for Mediation) in the same month to start new negotiations while land occupations in Chiapas by dozens of peasants' organizations intensified. On the other hand, the police as well as the big landowners' "white guards" violently evicted people from occupied areas. On the 19th of December, the EZLN advanced over a wide part of Chiapas occupying 38 municipalities only to return again to the jungle. The national army, after having already tightened the noose around the zone liberated by the Zapatistas since autumn 1994, invaded it in mid-February 1995 in order to arrest their leaders. After large solidarity demonstrations in Mexico City and lest class struggle should extend beyond Chiapas' boundaries, the army curtailed its advance and the government announced it was withdrawing its proclamation, characterizing the EZLN's leaders as "outlaws" and that it was ready to start negotiations. Despite opposition to the hardline policy and the army repression, the army's presence remained suffocating and when it deployed terrorist tactics many peasants took refuge in the jungle. In the abandoned villages the government settled poor and landless peasants from other areas. Up till now the situation is still explosive and uncertain...

What we're attempting here is a critical presentation and assessment of the movement avoiding the trap of radical journalism or being just another uncritical solidarity committee. To anyone hastening to accuse us of callousness because of the escalation of the Mexican governments' violence, we will retort that our point of view leaves behind an over-emotional approach that forbids thought, as well as a temporary fascination with just another case, the Zapatistas this time, which will move us for a while to pass onto something else later. We want to approach class struggle from an internationalist angle. We try to analyse how it is mediated by abstract democratic politics and what are the obstacles the insurgents themselves put in their way. Precisely when class struggle becomes intense one must attempt a critique that leaves behind glorification and uncritical identification. This is the best contribution to a rebellion that simply cannot be confined within Chiapas' or Mexico's boundaries. So, let's get down to the essentials:

The EZLN constitutes now the most organised political form of class struggle in Mexico and has helped in an explosion of land occupations in Chiapas and to resurgence of antagonism around the social question in this state. There is a great tradition of peasant movements in Mexico that's led to this outburst and, of course, it's not down to the intelligence of the EZLN's much publicized leaders, Marcos or Tacho, who have become the idols of leftists, "progressive thinkers" and the mass media. Since Colonialism many Indian guerilla movements (Mayas in Yucatan, Yopes in Guerrero, Chichimeca in the north, Yaquis in Sonora, Mixtec in Oaxaca, Tzeltal in Chiapas, Huasteca in Veracruz, Hidalgo and San Luis Potosi) resisted land seizures, and thus becoming slaves or wage labourers, regionally rather than nationally. During the Mexican-american war resistance was conducted with guerilla tactics by agrarian and worker movements, whose aims ranged from social banditry, land takeovers to free peasant communities. After the Mexican Revolution, in the mid-40's until 1962, Ruben Jaramillo's movement in the state of Morelos -once Zapata's co-fighter and member of the CP- propagated "Land and Liberty" by deed. In the early 60's guevarist marxists, peasants, workers, intellectuals, artists and liberal politicians rallied around the agraristas, peasant militants demanding land reform, forming MLN (Movement for National Liberation) for the revitalization of the Mexican Revolution. Later, many peasants, ex-members of the MLN organized a guerilla army in Guerrero under the leadership of the teacher Vasquez. In the 70's dozens of urban and peasant guerilla groups emerged, mainly of guevarist ideology (the "Party of the Poor" of Lucio Cabanas etc) and now several armed peasant movements are active in rural Mexico (in November 1993 a meeting of 52 armed groups took place in Guerrero under the auspices of the "Guerilla General Coordinate"!).

One of the basic reasons that the Zapatistas as a guerilla movement monopolize attention and sympathy, apart from the coverage they get by the media, is the re-adjustment of their former guevarist ideology and the adoption of the dominant, nowadays, democratic pluralistic ideology: "The EZLN was born having as points of reference the political military organizations of the guerilla movements in Latin America during the sixties and seventies...political-military structures with the central aim of overthrowing a regime and the taking of power by the people in general...(the indigenous people) needed military instruction, and we needed the support of a social base...", says Marcos in his interview by the Mexican anarchists Amor y Rabia and goes on "We are proposing a space, an equilibrium between the different political forces in order that each position has the same opportunity to influence the political direction of this country...This is why we propose democracy, freedom and justice -justice in order that certain material conditions are satisfied so that people have an opportunity to participate in the political life of the country...we are talking about a democratic space where the political parties, or groups that aren't parties, can air and discuss their social proposals".

However, he adds enigmatically "...We are saying that yes, we do have our idea of how the country should be", something that is repeated in their Second declaration "...the EZLN has a vision about the country. The EZLN's political maturity as the expression of the feelings of part of the nation lies in that it does not wish to impose its vision on the country". Trying to guess what this vision is, is quite pointless, so let's see something more unequivocal by EZLN, a part from their "Revolutionary Laws of the Liberated Territories". According to their "Revolutionary Agrarian Law":

"...Third: All poor-quality land in excess of 100 hectares and all good-quality land in excess of 50 hectares will be subject to the revolutionary agricultural law. The landowners whose lands exceed the afore-mentioned limits will have the excess taken away from them and they will be left with the minimum permitted by this law. They may remain as small landholders or join the cooperative peasants' movement, peasant societies, or communal lands.

Fourth: Communally-held land and the land of popular cooperatives will not be subject to agrarian reform, even though they exceed the limits mentioned in the third article of this law.

Fifth: The lands affected by this agrarian law will be distributed to the landless peasants and the agricultural labourers who thus request it as collective property for the formation of cooperatives, peasant societies or agricultural production/livestock collectives. The affected lands should be worked collectively.

Sixth: The collectives of poor, landless peasants and agricultural labourers, men, women, and children without land title, or who have land of poor quality, will have the right to be the first to request land.

Seventh: In order to better cultivate the land for the benefit of the poor peasants and the agricultural labourers, the expropriation of large estates and agricultural/livestock monopolies will include the expropriation of means of production such as machinery, fertilizer, stores, financial resources, chemical products and technical expertise. All of these means should pass into the hands of the poor peasants and agricultural labourers, with special attention given to groups organised in cooperatives, collectives and societies...

Tenth: ...When a region doesn't produce some product, it will trade justly and equally (sic) with another region where it is produced. Excess production can be exported to other countries if there is no national demand for the product.

Eleventh: Large agricultural businesses will be expropriated and passed to the hands of the Mexican people, and will be administered collectively by the workers of those businesses...

Sixteenth: The peasants that work collectively will not be taxed. Nor will the ejidos, cooperatives or communal lands be taxed. From the moment that this revolutionary agrarian law is implemented, all debts...are forgiven".

Such an agrarian programme -the most radical piece EZLN has published until now- does not oppose private property nor market economy and put in the overall context of the "Revolutionary Laws" which provide for:

--respect for a "freely elected" representative government, --stocks to workers in proportion to the number of years they have worked,

--nationalizations of unproductive industries and businesses,

--dual power, with the Zapatistas as self-proclaimed supervisors of the revolutionary process, its participatory, social-democratic character appears more clearly.

In juxtaposition, we will remind the anarchists and libertarians who rushed into embracing EZLN uncritically, Magon's anarcho-communist programme, and in particular some excerpts from PLM's Manifest of 23rd of September 1911 about generalized expropriation (19):

"Thus humanity remains divided into two classes whose interests are diametrically opposed -the capitalist class and the working class...Between these two social classes there cannot exist any bond of friendship or fraternity, for the possessing class always seeks to perpetuate the existing economic, political and social system which guarantees it tranquil enjoyment of the fruits of its robberies, while the working class exerts itself to destroy the iniquitous system and institute one in which the land, the houses, the machinery of production and the means of transportation shall be for the common use... Expropriation must be pursued to the end, at all costs, while this grand movement lasts...acts of expropriation must not be limited to taking possession of the land and the implements of agriculture alone. There must be a resolute taking possession, of all the industries by those working in them, who should bring it about similarly that the lands, the mines, the factories, the workshops, the foundries, the railroads, the shipping, the stores of all kinds and the houses shall be in the power of each and every one of the inhabitants, without distinction of sex... Everything produced will be sent to the community's general store, from which all will have the right to take what their necessities require, on the exhibition proof that they are working at such and such an industry. The human being aspires to satisfy wants with the least possible expenditure of effort, and the best way to obtain that result is to work the land and the other industries in common. If the land is divided up and each family takes a piece there will be grave danger of falling anew into the capitalist system... Of course there will be enough for each to have his own house and a ground plot for his own pleasure... Let each, according to his temperament, tastes, and inclinations choose the kind of work that suits him best, provided he produces sufficient to cover his necessary wants and does not become a charge on the community... It is for you, then, to choose. Either a new governor -that is to say, a new yoke- or life-redeeming expropriation and the abolition of all imposition, be that imposition religious, political or of any other kind".

Despite its reformist, social-democratic character, the EZLN's agrarian programme is opposed to Chiapas' big landowners, as well as to the strategy of international capital, since communalism, small-scale ownership or nationalizations (especially giving NAFTA's existence) are obstacles in its way. In this law, as well as in the EZLN's other laws about women's equality, labour, industry and commerce, the explosive potential of social revolution is inherent in an alienated form, and however limited to Chiapas and to the ejidatarios, this revolt expresses the universal demand of the uprooted individual separated from true community, human nature.

Deprived of human community by the Mexican state and international capital through the New Enclosures, the ejidatarios reaffirm community anew occupying land and expropriating the means of production -something they did before the EZLN's existence and now with the help of the latter's armed struggle, carry on doing so even more dynamically. If we consider that the New Enclosures constitute an attack against the communal control of the means of subsistence, then, they are not aimed only at Chiapas' ejidatario or generally the peasants of the so-called "Third World". They affect the "First World" as well, intensifying the mobility of labour, fostering emigration and causing social-democracy to retreat almost to the point of capital's total domination. In this respect, the rebellion in Chiapas, "the expropriation of the expropriators" has a universal dimension that transcends the local social uprising of the semi-proletarian peasants. However, at the same time, while the EZLN wishes to give to this rebellion a supposedly more general and wider character, it limits it, on the contrary, within national and political frames. In their First Declaration from the Lacandona Jungle they made clear that they struggled for the right to "...freely and democratically elect our political representatives..." and went on to mention that through their struggle they applied article 39 of the constitution which reads: "National Sovereignty essentially and originally resides in the people. All political power emanates from the people and its purpose is to help the people. The people have, at all times the inalienable right to alter or modify their form of government". This article, part of the constitution of every modern Democracy, inspires the EZLN who want to apply it to the very letter.

In their 34 points-demands addressed to the government they demanded inter alia: "Free and democratic elections with equal rights and obligations for all political organizations contending for power, true liberty to choose one or another proposal and respect for the will of the majority. Democracy is a fundamental right for all Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Without democracy there can be no liberty, justice or dignity and without dignity there is nothing". In their Second Declaration from the Lacandona Jungle, the EZLN reject the government's electoral reform because "...it perpetuates the seizing of the popular will", and they repeat their wish for "...a political solution which could lead to a peace with dignity and justice" and address an invitation to the "independent and progressive ones for a national dialogue, for a peace with democracy, liberty and justice", they talk about "...Civil society (which) assumed the responsibility to protect the country" and stress the fact that "(we should provide)...so that those who govern, govern obeying". So they address "Civil Society", proposing to "all the independent political parties to condemn the limitation and deprivation of people's civil rights during the last 66 years and to demand the formation of a transitional democratic government". The EZLN's pluralistic, national-democratic and populist ideology reaches a climax when they declare that "Within the framework of the new political relations, the different propositions about the system and the orientation (socialism, capitalism, social-democracy, liberalism, christian-democracy etc[!] ) should convince the majority of the people of the correctness of their programmes".

One would suppose that the EZLN's language is completely outdated if the Mexican state, an authoritarian democracy, wasn't patriarchical and populist and if, particularly in Chiapas, backward structures, longtime organized political and economic gangs didn't still survive, which the dominant modernizing tendency within the PRI wants to get rid of, too. The Mexican state, even in its present form, seeks to win voters' consent and as for the electoral fraud, its indisputable existance does not refute the success of the PRI's cooptation politics (Allianza Civica, a coalition of non-government organizations, which observed the electoral process, reported anomalies which didn't however alter the outcome of the present elections).

However, what is of interest from the standpoint of social revolution is the context, the essence, the meaning of democracy (whether of the Mexican or european type) and of "Civil Society". Democracy, the democratic state is not a timeless idyllic state of things above history, but the political outcome of class struggles since the French Revolution. In Mexico, through the Revolution of 1910-20, the basis of the democratic state was laid, which resides in the "sovereign people" satisfying legally some of the peasants' and workers' demands after having trodden on their dead bodies.

The basis and the content of democratic "political society", this "spiritual, heavenly community" is none other than the society of private individuals, of real people with their private and competitive interests, of class society. This real competitive society called the "Mexican people" or the "Mexican nation" is unified abstractly in the Mexican state. "Man in his immediate reality, in civil society, is a profane being", says Marx in the Jewish Question. "Here, where he regards himself and is regarded by others as a real individual, he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand [in the "political society"], where he is considered to be a species-being, he is the imaginary member of a fictitious sovereignty, he is divested of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality". Mexican "Civil Society", which includes ejidatarios, workers, businessmen etc, will probably be able to liberate itself politically, modernizing and liberalizing the political system and abolishing the one-party rule. However, it cannot abolish its immediate alienating reality. Because this battle is fought by the ejidatario repossessing communal land and by the proletarian against flexibility and immiseration, whereas the EZLN's national-democratic ideology urges them to fight as "citizens", namely as members of an imaginary community.

No government, neither the one that "governs obeying" nor any other, will ever liberate human beings, since it will always re-unify them abstractly as citizens retaining simultaneously their class divisions, even by force. Because, naturally, no "people" in any democracy, even the most liberal was ever convinced by, or, has ever chosen to be governed by capitalism! With their persistence in pursuing "clean elections", the Zapatistas actually favoured the PRD and its leader, "citizen engineer Cardenas" -to use one of their expressions. And now many peasants in Chiapas recognize Avendano, the PRD's candidate, as "their own man" who expresses their will. In their 17/12/94 communique, the EZLN state, among other things: "EZLN recognize the social forces rallied around engineer Cardenas and the CND, as an honest, civil and peaceful opposition against the government's impositions; for this reason, the EZLN addresses themselves to citizen-engineer Cardenas and the National Council of Representatives of the CND to ask them, irrespective of their political affiliation and party commitment (sic), to convey the EZLN's voice to Mexican society and to the personalities in the political life of the nation that they consider to be competent, presenting them the means which would render a stable truce possible:

1. Satisfactory solution for the conflicting parts after the elections in the states of Veracruz, Chiapas and Tabasco.

2. Recognition of the transitional democratic government in the state of Chiapas.

3. Recognition on the part of the federal government of CONAI as a neutral organ which can make possible the political solution to the conflict. The EZLN recognize the effort of citizen-engineer Cardenas and the CND for a peace with justice and dignity".

Generally, the EZLN's relationship with the PRD and the CND (which consists mainly of PRD members and cadres) is one of partners-allies against the common enemy the PRI and the one-party state. A partnership wherein each part wants to retain its autonomy.

In an interview in La Jornada (7/12/94), Marcos made clear that the "return" to guns afetr the second meeting of the CND was the continuation of the EZLN's democratic politics by other means. In fact, the Zapatistas never considerd the electoral process and the use of guns as two incompatible activities. In the same interview, Marcos was quite clear: "The guns ought to open up space again, spitting lead enables politics to be exerted again". For this very reason, we do not limit our attention in this text to the EZLN's partial tactics but we try to point out the essential content of their politics on the whole.

Closely related to the EZLN's national-democratic ideology is their social-patriotism. "We are the inheritors of the true builders of our nation. We, the dispossessed, are millions and we thereby call upon our brothers and sisters to join this struggle as the only path, so that we will not die of hunger due to the insatiable ambition of a 70-year dictatorship led by a clique of traitors who represent sell-out cliques and the most conservative elements", they said in their First Declaration from the Lacandona Jungle and in their communique of the 6th of January, they made clear that "...we try to unite the Mexican people and its independent organizations so that through all forms of struggle, a national liberation movement can be formed which will enable the presence of honest and patriotic social organizations for Mexico's progress". In their Second Declaration, they refer to "the plunder of national wealth", to the "government's persistence in implementing an economic plan that increases poverty in our country for the benefit of the foreigners" as a reply to the EZLN's demand for a revision of NAFTA. Marcos, in the interview with Amor y Rabia explains the extent of the EZLN's "internationalist" politics: "...as far as international politics is concerned, we have nothing more than our appeal for solidarity to the Mexican and latino community in the USA, to help us as a fraternal nation". This nationalism that traps class struggle within state borders or seeks out people of similar ethnic descent without regard to class, sabotages the modern dimension of the rebellion against NAFTA. Precisely now, when it's pointless to refer to Mexicans in general when it's Mexican as well as american proletarians (Chicanos or otherwise) who are being hit hard by capital's world integration, precisely now, when the social question cannot be limited to Mexico's borders, the Zapatistas intensify class struggle whilst holding the national flag as their banner against the "sell-out" government and "foreign capital". They foster the false vision of socialism in one country again and they (together with a fraction of the Mexican bourgeoisie threatened by capital's integration) fill the ideological gap opened by capital's internationalization in the Mexican government's propaganda apparatus. Whereas the PRI in dismantling the welfare state is forced to tone down its nationalistic demagogy, now, it seems, social-patriotic and nationalistic slogans emerge on behalf of the proletariat -another fact indicating that what happens in Mexico is not soleley a Mexican affair. Do not the protestations of trade unions in several European countries calling privatizations of nationalized corporations "sell-outs" wrap up class struggle in a social-democratic, nationalist language? Or, don't references to the "threat against our cultural heritage" from european integration signify the false identification of popular culture with the nation?

Do not be misled into supposing that the quarrel between Madero and ourselves is a quarrel between Mexicans, which Mexicans should be left to settle for themselves. It is not. It is the old, inextinguishable quarrel between bourgeoisie and proletariat; between monopolists and disinherited; between those who wish to live peacefully under the existing system and those who know that under the present system there is no peace...This quarrel therefore, is yours. Without playing the traitor to the great international cause of the emancipation of labour you cannot ignore it... We do not appeal to you to help US. Our appeal is that you leave no stone unturned to help YOURSELVES by utilizing the magnificent opportunity of forwarding the common cause which the Mexican Revolution affords.

Regeneracion, PLM's newspaper, from the "Appeal to members of the [american] Socialist Party" of 29/4/1911, later included in the article "Labour's solidarity should know neither race nor colour".

The Zapatistas are therefore criticised in the context of international class antagonism which their nationalist ideology does not promote and not of course because they "do not make the revolution". The dimensions of the social question in Chiapas and Mexico in general transcend their ideology, even if they were the ones who escalated class struggle and are keeping it up to a great extent. The attacks against proletarians in Mexico and the States during the last decade have generated new struggles. In California, Proposition 187, which denies "illegal" immigrants access to health care, education and social care in general has become a law, after a referendum with 59% for and 41% against (20). On the other hand, they reduce the length of time on welfare benefit and lower the age at which children can be tried as adults from 16 to 14...among other things the "Republican Revolution" has accomplished. The first reaction last October was the largest demonstration (over 100,000) in L.A. for several decades. There were also student walk-outs, rallies and sit-ins and there are a lot of indications that maybe the outbreak in 1992 (the big L.A. riot) will happen again. Perhaps the hiring of 3,000 new cops was no coincidence.

As a reaction to NAFTA, transnational networks have already been formed linking activists in the USA, Mexico and Canada. Labour unions, women's groups, farmers, environmental, religious and intellectual organisations -about sixty in all- have formed transnational coalitions demanding a "revision of NAFTA", "democratization of the IMF and the World Bank", "equitable, sustainable and participatory development", a new "global Keynesianism", redistribution of wealth between "poor and rich countries", "a civil society without borders...for a participatory and sustainable global village". This new social-democratic vision without borders, that brings together dissimilar social groups of limited class composition (from the petite-bourgeois to labour unions leaders, from feminists to academics) is forced by the internationalization of capital to get over any idea of exclusively national action. It is precisely this new strategy of capital which, although it precipitates the collapse of the social-democratic parties based on a Keynesian national development, generates a new social-democracy in the form of grass-roots movements of a transnational orientation. It is certainly a positive fact that in this transitional age, one of global restructuring of social relations, neo-Keynesianism recognizes the international character of capital's attack and stresses global solidarity. However, it is not only that this multicultural reformism is undesirable; it is also questionable whether permanent reforms are possible any longer.

Not an unimportant role in the division between Mexican and american proletarians is played out in the ideologies of the "bad gringos" and the Mexican "traitors" who in migrating to the USA "forgot" the nation and the Raza. Against these so-called pochos, the old anti-imperialist hatred rages again vehemently, something that makes the identification of second and third generation immigrants with Chiapanecos or Mexican proletarians in general almost impossible. On the other side of the borders ("al otro lado") racism against immigrants intensifies, especially after its legislative consolidation.

While the New Enclosures are imposed globally through the pillaging of communal land, privatizations, the war on rents, the decline in wages, the destructuration of the welfare state, immigration, "working in the black", developers destroying the countryside (construction of huge motorways, airports etc), the struggles everywhere against all of this, cannot as yet, go beyond their partiality. While the internationalist vision appears nowadays as an urgent necessity and not as a mere abstract principle, new barriers of nation, race and localism rise up to annul it.

If the Zapatistas, limiting the rebellion in Mexico to a political, national affair, assign us, at best, the tasks of just a solidarity committee, we can only feel for ourselves what is ours in this struggle. Contrary to the PRD which organizes solidarity campaigns for the Zapatistas in Europe gathering signatures from academics, artists and sympathizers in general, our practical solidarity to the ejidatarios and proletarians in Chiapas will be to continue squatting, to struggle against privatizations and the alienation of everyday life, aiming to develop these struggles into the creation of a world human community.
KATERINA, Athens -March 1995

NOTES
(1) Marxist-leninist organizations mostly, the so-called "extremists", arousing suspicion from many sides that they are PRI agents -such suspicions and accusations in Mexico are quite common, since the spectacle of terrorism and spying is perfectly organized and adds to confusion.

(2) It is the name the EZLN gave to the jungle meeting place where the convention met referring symbolically to the convention of representatives of Villa's, Zapata's and the Constitutionalists' armies in 1914, in the vortex of the Mexican Revolution. However, comparing these two conventions the only resemblance seems to be the name.

(3) Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the leader of the PRD, is the son of Lazaro Cardenas, the reformist ex-president. An ex-member of the PRI and ex-governor of the state of Michoacan, gathered round him the "democratic current" within the PRI. Now with the PRD he represents the nationalist, social-patriotic tendency. Gaining 31% in the elections in 1988 he was considered to be the actual winner, although the PRI came to power again through blatant fraud. It's worth mentioning that the abstention then amounted to 50%.

4) The Plan de Ayala, a concise, fiery outline of the Zapatistas' objectives was written by Zapata and his comrade and former school-teacher, Otilio Montano.

(5) "Zapata emphasized "land and liberty", that is, restitution of stolen lands, water and pasture rights and the restoration of village democracy. Not that the Zapatistas lacked a proletarian consciousness -on the contrary, they seized all the means of production; fields, mills, railway stations, and distilleries. They set up liberated zones, basing themselves on communal traditions of village self-government. Zapata's was a classic "people's war", fought in guerilla fashion, and his forces enjoyed great popular participation and support. First Diaz, then Madero, then Huerta, and eventually the Constitutionalists launched scorched-earth campaigns of terror against the Zapatistas, indiscriminately killing any civilians in their path, but so long as their charismatic leader lived, the Zapatistas resisted the demoralization that these barbarous attacks sought to provoke.

In the north, Villa's forces were less homogeneous than those of Zapata. In addition to former bureaucrats of the Madero regime, who helped administer the immense expanses of territory liberated by Villa's army, the top ranks of Villa's followers included more cowboy caudillos * (vaqueros or charros), rancheros, and petty bourgois storekeepers than it did communal peasant farmers; the foot soldiers were usually miners, migrant farmworkers, railway workers, and the unemployed. The aims of the Villistas were thus more worker-orientated or petty bourgeois than they were pro-peasant: as foremen of large estates, vaqueros, or independent ranchers, cowboy caudillos had commanded peasants but had not experienced land hunger at first hand. Workers were more interested in gainful employment than in farming for themselves. Thus lands seized by Villa's army were held by the state, not given to the peasants." J. Cockroft "Mexico. Class Formation, Capital Accumulation and the State". * strong regional (mostly military) leaders.

6) US intervention through the invasion of Veracruz not only gave the Constitutionalists a military advantage but also helped them claim credit for "throwing out the yankee invaders" and pose as "anti-imperialists".

(7) Founded in 1929 as the PNR: National Revolutionary Party it was renamed PMR: Party of the Mexican revolution in 1938; we are talking about the PRI, which is still in power.

(8) Nevertheless, foreign (mostly US) capital has always had a strong presence in Mexico, especially in industry. According to a study in 1970, of the 2,040 companies with the largest profits, foreign capital controlled 36% of the income of the largest 400 companies and participated in another 18%, while Mexican private capital and the Mexican government controlled 21% and 25% correspondingly. (

9) We are referring to politicians and army officers, who during the Revolution amassed vast quantities of land for themselves, which they kept later under state support.

(10) Walking the streets of Mexico City, one is immersed in Mexican history and especially the period of the Revolution: subway stations, streets, squares etc. bearing the names of militants assassinated by this very state that later declared them "national heroes". After the student uprising in 1968, even Magon was pronounced a "hero", although formerly he had been condemned as "anti-Mexican", due to his internationalism.

(11) Local bosses, more information in the chapter RURAL MEXICO AND THE NEW ENCLOSURES.

12) Both Mexican and foreign (mainly US), these labour-intensive assembly plants were first established in 1964 along the borderline by the Mexican government. The maquiladoras run under extremely favourable terms for capital accumulation (no duties are imposed on parts imported from US and similarly there are no duties on the assembled products exported to the US). The workers are mostly landless peasants (especially very young women) from the same region, so that the management (Mexican or not) can better exploit them through traditional, paternalistic methods such as donations to the village, being godparents (compadrazco) etc.

(13) See in "Midnight Notes" #9 H.Cleaver's article: "The uses of an earthquake".

(14) See "Midnight Oil" by Midnight Notes, especially chapters "Oil, guns and money" and "Audit of the crisis".

(15) Ejido means exit since the communal land usually lay on the outer edges of the village.

16) It is highly interesting to examine the methodology followed in those programmes. The emphasis was laid on the "participation" of the peasants in their exploitation, which presupposed regional "information" about the peasants' behaviour. Usually a spying network was set up to track down the leaders of agrarian movements and then followed the implementation of the programme and the death squads for those peasants disagreeing with development. Both the time -in the 70's- and the place -Guerrero and Oaxaca, states with a tradition of agrarian movements and especially armed ones- were not selected accidentally for this exchange of funds for "information" necessary for disbanding agrarian organizations and the peasants' subsequent subordination to capital (see Kaffentzis, "Let me speak of the end of the World Bank and IMF").

17) Already since the 60's leasing ejidos, although prohibited according to the constitution, was allowed after certain amendments were made. Ejidal Bank and Banco Rural, both in the interests of big landowners, acted as collective owners and controllers of the ejidos.

18) However often it resorts to electoral fraud, repression and violence, the Mexican state has also promoted and refined its recuperational practice. As we have already shown, it knows how to use both the rifle and money; to give away scholarships amply or publish Bakunin's collected works and assassinate political opponents. We may then speak of an authoritarian but democratic state.

19) References to Magon (here and below) serve two purposes: first, to show to what extent the anarcho-communist movement during the Mexican Revolution and the existing Zapatista movement differ, as a response to an attempt by Greek anarchists to present the latter as a direct continuance of the former; second, to highlight the content and perspectives of that defeated movement at the turn of the century which can be very inspiring today, even though the historical context is quite different. Namely, the communist, internationalist perspective and the rejection of all political party manipulations.

(20) The case was brought to court by the L.A. School Board, immigrant rights groups and civil liberties advocates disputing Proposition's 187 constitutionality. As for the referendum, the white/Anglo electorate voted for Prop. 187 by a 63% to 37%, Blacks against, 53% to 47%, and although the Latinos also voted against by 77%, 23% voted for it. Among the latter two communities those in favour of the Prop. thought that they protected themselves against the threat of the undocumented workers depressing wages and monopolizing unskilled jobs (info from "News and Letters, vol. 39, no 10).

For this text, except for those sources already mentioned, the following ones were also "expropriated":

--P. Newell, "Zapata of Mexico"

--"Land and Liberty, Anarchist Influences in the Mexican Revolution, R.F. Magon"

--K. Dawkins, "NAFTA, GATT and WTO", Open Magazine Pamphlet Series

--"The other side of Mexico", # 34 and 36 --Wildcat, #60

--Marc Cooper, "Zapatistas, Chiapas, Mexico", Open Magazine Pamphlet Series

Excerpts from EZLN's declarations and communiques were mainly taken from "Love and Rage", vol. 5, issues no 1, 2, 3.

Text taken from the Collective Action Notes website

It will be published in London by Pluto Press in June/July 1998. We thank John Holloway for his kind permission. A brief version of this article was published in Common Sense # 22, December 1997.

Dignity's Revolt

John Holloway

I

Dignity arose on the first day of January 1994.

The 'Enough!' ('!Ya Basta!') proclaimed by the Zapatistas on the first day of 1994 was the cry of dignity. When they occupied San Cristobal de las Casas and six other towns of Chiapas on that day, the wind they blew into the world, 'this wind from below, the wind of rebellion, the wind of dignity', carried 'a hope, the hope of the conversion of dignity and rebellion into freedom and dignity'.(1) When the wind dies down, 'when the storm abates, when the rain and the fire leave the earth in peace once again, the world will no longer be the world, but something better'.(2)

A letter from the ruling body of the Zapatistas, the Comite Clandestino Revolucionario Indigena (CCRI),(3) addressed just a month later to another indigenous organisation, the Consejo 500 Anos de Resistencia Indigena,(4) emphasises the central importance of dignity:

'Then that suffering that united us made us speak, and we recognised that in our words there was truth, we knew that not only pain and suffering lived in our tongue, we recognised that there is hope still in our hearts. We spoke with ourselves, we looked inside ourselves and we looked at our history: we saw our most ancient fathers suffering and struggling, we saw our grandfathers struggling, we saw our fathers with fury in their hands, we saw that not everything had been taken away from us, that we had the most valuable, that which made us live, that which made our step rise above plants and animals, that which made the stone be beneath our feet, and we saw, brothers, that all that we had was DIGNITY, and we saw that great was the shame of having forgotten it, and we saw that DIGNITY was good for men to be men again, and dignity returned to live in our hearts, and we were new again, and the dead, our dead, saw that we were new again and they called us again, to dignity, to struggle'.(5)

Dignity, the refusal to accept humiliation and dehumanisation, the refusal to conform: dignity is the core of the Zapatista revolution of revolution. The idea of dignity has not been invented by the Zapatistas, but they have given it a prominence that it has never before possessed in revolutionary thought. When the Zapatistas rose, they planted the flag of dignity not just in the centre of the uprising in Chiapas, but in the centre of oppositional thought. Dignity is not peculiar to the indigenous peoples of the southeast of Mexico: the struggle to convert 'dignity and rebellion into freedom and dignity' (an odd but important formulation) is the struggle of (and for) human existence in an oppressive society, as relevant to life in Edinburgh, Athens, Tokyo, Los Angeles or Johannesburg as it is to the struggles of the peoples of the Lacandon Jungle.

The aim of this essay is to explore what it means to put dignity at the centre of oppositional thought. In the course of the argument it should become clear why 'zapatismo' is not a movement restricted to Mexico but is central to the struggle of thousands of millions of people all over the world to live a human life against-and-in an increasingly inhuman society.

The essay aims not so much to give a historical account of the Zapatista movement as to provide a distillation of the most important themes, without at the same time concealing the ambiguities and contradictions of the movement. In order to distill a fragrant essence from roses, it is not necessary to conceal the existence of the thorns, but thorns do not enter into what one wants to extract. The purpose of trying to distill the theoretical themes of zapatismo is similar to the purpose behind any distillation process: to separate those themes from the immediate historical development of the Zapatista movement, to extend the fragrance beyond the immediacy of the particular experience.

II

Dignity was wrought in the jungle.

The uprising of the first of January 1994 was more than ten years in the preparation. The EZLN(6) celebrates the 17th November 1983 as the date of its foundation. On that date a small group of revolutionaries established themselves in the mountains of the Lacandon Jungle - 'a small group of men and women, three indigenous and three mestizos'.(7)

According to the police version, the revolutionaries were members of the Fuerzas de Liberacion Nacional(8) (FLN), a guerrilla organisation founded in 1969 in the city of Monterrey, one of a number of such organisations which flourished in Mexico in the late sixties and early seventies. Many of the members of the FLN had been killed or arrested, but the organisation had survived. Its statutes of 1980 describe the organisation as 'a political-military organisation whose aim is the taking of political power by the workers of the countryside and of the cities of the Mexican Republic, in order to instal a popular republic with a socialist system'. The organisation was guided, according to its statutes, by 'the science of history and society: Marxism-Leninism, which has demonstrated its validity in all the triumphant revolutions of this century'.(9)

The supposed origins of the EZLN(10) are used by the authorities to suggest an image of manipulation of the indigenous people by a group of hard-core professional revolutionaries from the city. However, leaving aside the racist assumptions of such an argument, the supposed origins of the revolutionaries merely serve to underline the most important question: if, as is claimed, the small group of revolutionaries who set up the EZLN came from an orthodox Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group, how did they become transformed into what eventually emerged from the jungle in the early hours of 1994? What was the path that led from the first encampment of 17th November 1983 to the proclamation of dignity in the town hall of San Cristobal? For it is precisely the fact that they are not an orthodox guerrilla group that has confounded the state time and time again in its dealings with them. It is precisely the fact that they are not an orthodox group of revolutionaries that makes them theoretically and practically the most exciting development in oppositional politics in the world for many a long year.

What, then, was it that the original founders of the EZLN learned in the jungle? A letter written by Marcos(11) speaks of the change in these terms: 'We did not propose it. The only thing that we proposed to do was to change the world; everything else has been improvisation. Our square conception of the world and of revolution was badly dented in the confrontation with the indigenous realities of Chiapas. Out of those blows, something new (which does not necessarily mean 'good') emerged, that which today is known as "neo-Zapatismo".'

The confrontation with the indigenous realities took place as the Zapatistas became immersed in the communities of the Lacandon Jungle. At first the group of revolutionaries kept themselves to themselves, training in the mountains, slowly expanding in numbers. Then gradually they made contact with the local communities, initially through family contacts, then, from about 1985 onwards,(12) on a more open and organised basis. Gradually, more and more of the communities sought out the Zapatistas to help them defend themselves from the police or the farmers' armed 'white guards',(13) more and more became Zapatista communities, some of their members going to join the EZLN on a full-time basis, some forming part of the part-time militia, the rest of the community giving material support to the insurgents. Gradually, the EZLN was transformed from being a guerrilla group to being a community in arms.(14)

The community in question is in some respects a special community. The communities of the Lacandon Jungle are of recent formation, most of them dating from the 1950s and 1960s, when the government encouraged colonisation of the jungle by landless peasants, most of whom moved from other areas of Chiapas, in many cases simply transplanting whole villages. There is a long tradition of struggle, both from before the formation of the communities in the jungle and then, very intensely, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as the people fought to get enough land to ensure their own survival, as they tried to secure the legal basis of their landholdings, as they fought to maintain their existence against the expansion of the cattle ranches, as they resisted the threat to their survival posed by two government measures in particular, the Decree of the Lacandon Community,(15) a government decree which threatened to expropriate a large part of the Lacandon Jungle and the 1992 reform of Article 27 of the Constitution, which, by opening the countryside up to private investment, threatened to undermine the system of collective landholding. The communities of the Lacandon Jungle are special in many respects, but arguably the rethinking of revolutionary theory and practice could have resulted from immersion in any community:(16) what was important was probably not the specific characteristics of the Lacandon Jungle, so much as the transformation from being a group of dedicated young men and women into being an armed community of women, men, children, young, old, ill - all with their everyday struggles not just for survival but for humanity.

The Zapatistas learnt the pain of the community: the poverty, the hunger, the constant threat of harrassment by the authorities or the 'white guards', the unnecessary deaths from curable diseases. When asked in an interview which death had affected him most, Marcos told how a girl of three or four years old, Paticha (her way of saying Patricia), had died in his arms in a village. She had started a fever at six o'clock in the evening, and by ten o'clock she was dead: there was no medicine in the village that could help to lower her fever. 'And that happened many times, it was so everydady, so everyday that those births are not even taken into account. For example, Paticha never had a birth certificate, which means that for the country she never existed, for the statistical office (INEGI), therefore her death never existed either. And like her, there were thousands, thousands and thousands, and as we grew in the communities, as we had more villages, more comrades died. Just because death was natural, now it started to be ours.'(17) From such experiences arose the conviction that revolution was something that the Zapatistas owed to their children: 'we, their fathers, their mothers, their brothers and sisters, did not want to bear any more the guilt of doing nothing for our children.'(18)

They learnt the struggles of the people, both the struggles of the present and the struggles of the past, the continuing struggle of past and present. The culture of the people is a culture of struggle. Marcos tells of the story-telling by the campfire at night in the mountains - 'stories of apparitions, of the dead, of earlier struggles, of things that have happened, all mixed together. It seems that they are talking of the revolution (of the Mexican revolution, the past one, not the one that is happening now) and at moments no, it seems that is mixed up with the colonial period and sometimes it seems that it is the pre-hispanic period.'(19) The culture of struggle permeates the Zapatista communiques, often in the form of stories and myths: Marcos's stories of Old Antonio (el viejo Antonio) are a favourite way of passing on a culture impregnated with the wisdom of struggle.

And they learnt to listen. 'That is the great lesson that the indigenous communities teach to the original EZLN. The original EZLN, the one that is formed in 1983, is a political organisation in the sense that it speaks and what it says has to be done. The indigenous communities teach it to listen, and that is what we learn. The principal lesson that we learn from the indigenous people is that we have to learn to hear, to listen.'(20) Learning to listen meant incorporating new perspectives and new concepts into their theory. Learning to listen meant learning to talk as well, not just explaining things in a different way but thinking them in a different way.

Above all, learning to listen meant turning everything upside down. The revolutionary tradition of talking is not just a bad habit. It has a long-established theoretical basis in the concepts of Marxism-Leninism. The tradition of talking derives, on the one hand, from the idea that theory ('class consciousness') must be brought to the masses by the party and, on the other, from the idea that capitalism must be analysed from above, from the movement of capital rather than from the movement of anti-capitalist struggle. When the emphasis shifts to listening, both of these theoretical suppositions are undermined. The whole relation between theory and practice is thrown into question: theory can no longer be seen as being brought from outside, but is obviously the product of everyday practice. And dignity takes the place of imperialism as the starting point of theoretical reflection.

Dignity was presumably not part of the conceptual baggage of the revolutionaries who went into the jungle. It is not a word that appears very much in the literature of the Marxist tradition.(21) It could only emerge as a revolutionary concept in the course of a revolution by a people steeped in the dignity of struggle.(22) But once it appears (conciously or unconsciously) as a central concept, then it implies a rethinking of the whole revolutionary project, both theoretically and in terms of organisation. The whole conception of revolution becomes turned outwards: revolution becomes a question rather than an answer. 'Preguntando caminamos: asking we walk' becomes a central principle of the revolutionary movement, the radically democratic concept at the centre of the Zapatista call for 'freedom, democracy and justice'. The revolution advances by asking, not by telling; or perhaps even, revolution is asking instead of telling, the dissolution of power relations.

Here too the Zapatistas learned from (and developed) the tradition of the indigenous communities. The idea and practice of their central organisational principle, 'mandar obedeciendo' ('to command obeying'), derives from the practice of the communities, in which all important decisions are discussed by the whole community to the point where a consensus is reached, and in which all holders of positions of authority are assumed to be immediately recallable if they do not satisfy the community, if they do not command obeying the community. Thus the decision to go to war was not taken by some central committee and then handed down, but was discussed by all the communities in village assemblies.(23) The whole organisation is structured along the same principle: the ruling body, the CCRI is composed of recallable delegates chosen by the different ethnic groups (tzotzil, tzeltal, tojolobal and chol), and each ethnic group and each region has its own committees chosen in assemblies on the same principle.

The changes wrought in those ten years of confrontation between the received ideas of revolution and the reality of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas were very deep. Marcos is quoted in one book as saying 'I think that our only virtue as theorists was to have the humility to recognise that our theoretical scheme did not work, that it was very limited, that we had to adapt ourselves to the reality that was being imposed on us'.(24) However, the result was not that reality imposed itself on theory, as some (25) argue, but that the confrontation with reality gave rise to a whole new and immensely rich theorisation of revolutionary practice.

III

The revolt of dignity is an undefined revolt.

A revolution that listens, a revolution that takes as its starting point the dignity of those in revolt, is inevitably an undefined revolution, a revolution in which the distinction between rebellion and revolution loses meaning. The revolution is a moving outwards rather than a moving towards.

There is no transitional programme, no definite goal. There is, of course, an aim: the achievement of a society based on dignity, or, in the words of the Zapatista slogan, 'democracy, freedom, justice'. But just what this means and what concrete steps need to be taken to achieve it is never spelt out. This has at times been criticised by those educated in the classical revolutionary traditions as a sign of the political immaturity of the Zapatistas or of their reformism, but it is the logical complement of putting dignity at the centre of the revolutionary project. If the revolution is built on the dignity of those in struggle, if a central principle is the idea of 'preguntando caminamos - asking we walk', then it follows that it must be self-creative, a revolution created in the process of struggle. If the revolution is not only to achieve democracy as an end, but is democratic in its struggle, then it is impossible to pre-define its path, or indeed to think of a defined point of arrival. Whereas the concept of revolution that has predominated in this century has been overwhelmingly instrumentalist,(26) a conception of a means designed to achieve an end, this conception breaks down as soon as the starting point becomes the dignity of those in struggle. The revolt of dignity forces us to think of revolution in a new way, as a rebellion that cannot be defined or confined, a rebellion that overflows, a revolution that is by its very nature ambiguous and contradictory.

The Zapatista uprising is in the first place a revolt of the indigenous peoples of the Lacandon Jungle, of the tzeltals, tzotzils, chols and tojolobals who live in that part of the state of Chiapas. For them, the conditions of living were (and are) such that the only choice, as they see it, is between dying an undignified death, the slow unsung death of misery suffered, and dying with dignity, the death of those fighting for their dignity and the dignity of those around them. The government has consistently tried to define and confine the uprising in those terms, as a matter limited to the state of Chiapas, but the Zapatistas have always refused to accept this. This was, indeed, the main point over which the first dialogue, the dialogue of San Cristobal, broke down.(27)

The Zapatista uprising is the assertion of indigenous dignity. The opening words of the Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, read from the balcony of the town hall of San Cristobal on the morning of the first of January 1994, were 'We are the product of 500 years of struggles'.(28) The uprising came just over a year after the demonstrations throughout America that marked the 500th anniversary of Columbus's 'discovery'. On that occasion, 12 October 1992, the Zapatistas had already marched through San Cristobal, when about ten thousand indigenous people, most of them Zapatistas(29) but under another guise, had taken the streets of the city. After the first of January 1994, the Zapatistas at once became the focus of the increasingly active indigenous movement in Mexico. When the EZLN began its dialogue with the government in April 1995, the dialogue of San Andres Larrainzar, the first theme for discussion was indigenous rights and culture. The Zapatistas used the dialogue to give cohesion to the indigenous struggle, asking representatives of all the main indigenous organisations of the country to join them as consultants or guests in the workshops which were part of the dialogue and concluding that phase of the dialogue with an Indigenous Forum, held in San Cristobal in January1996. The Indigenous Forum led in turn to the setting up of the Congreso Nacional Indigena (30) which gives a national focus to previously dispersed indigenous struggles. The first phase of the dialogue of San Andres also led to the signing of an agreement with the government designed to lead to changes in the constitution which would radically improve the legal position of indigenous peoples within the country, granting them important areas of autonomy.(31)

The Zapatista movement, however, has never claimed to be just an indigenous movement.(32) Overwhelmingly indigenous in composition, the EZLN has always made clear that it is fighting for a broader cause. Its struggle is for all those 'without voice, without face, without tomorrow', a category that stretches far beyond the indigenous peoples. The demands they make (work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace...) are not demands limited to the indigenous: they are demands for all. The Zapatista movement is a movement for national liberation, a movement not just for the liberation of the indigenous but of all.

The fact that the EZLN is an Army of National Liberation seems to give a clear definition to the movement. There have been many other movements (and wars) of national liberation in different parts of the world (Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Cambodia, Nicaragua etc). Here we have what appears to be a clearly defined and well-established framework: national liberation movements typically aim to liberate a national territory from foreign influence (the control of a colonial or neo-colonial power), to establish a government of national liberation designed to introduce radical social changes and establish national economic autonomy. If the Zapatista movement were a national liberation movement in that sense, then, if the history of such movements is anything to go by, there would be little to get excited about: it might be worthy of support and solidarity, but there would be nothing radically new about it. This indeed has been the position of some critics on the left.(33)

Looked at more closely, however, the apparent definition of 'Army of National Liberation' begins to dissolve. In the context of the uprising, the term 'national liberation' has more a sense of moving outwards than of moving inwards: 'national' in the sense of 'not just Chiapanecan' or 'not just indigenous', rather than 'national' in the sense of 'not foreign'.(34) 'Nation' is also used in the Zapatista communiques in the less clearly defined sense of 'homeland' ('patria'): the place where we happen to live, a space to be defended not just against imperialists but also (and more directly) against the state. 'Nation' is counterposed to the state, so that national liberation can even be understood as the liberation of Mexico from the Mexican state, or the defence of Mexico (or indeed whatever territory) against the state. 'Nation' in this sense refers to the idea of struggling wherever one happens to live, fighting against oppression, fighting for dignity. That the Zapatista movement is a movement of national liberation does not, then, confine or restrict the movement to Mexico: it can be understood rather as meaning a movement of liberation, wherever you happen to be (and whatever you happen to do). The fight for dignity cannot be restricted to national frontiers: 'dignity', in the wonderful expression used by Marcos in the invitation to the Intercontinental Gathering held in the Lacandon Jungle in July 1996, 'is that homeland without nationality, that rainbow that is also a bridge, that murmur of the heart no matter what blood lives in it, that rebel irreverence that mocks frontiers, customs officials and wars'.(35) It is consistent with this interpretation(36) of 'national liberation' that one of the principal slogans of the Zapatistas recently has been the theme chosen for the Intercontinental Gathering, 'for humanity and against neoliberalism'.

The open-ended nature of the Zapatista movement is summed up in the idea that it is a revolution, not a Revolution ("with small letters, to avoid polemics with the many vanguards and safeguards of THE REVOLUTION").(37) It is a revolution, because the claim to dignity in a society built upon the negation of dignity can only be met through a radical transformation of society. But it is not a Revolution in the sense of having some grand plan, in the sense of a movement designed to bring about the Great Event which will change the world. Its claim to be revolutionary lies not in the preparation for the future Event but in the present inversion of perspective, in the consistent insistence on seeing the world in terms of that which is incompatible with the world as it is: human dignity. Revolution refers to present existence, not to future instrumentality.

IV

The revolt of dignity is a revolt against definition.

The undefined, open-ended character of the Zapatista movement sometimes rouses the frustrations of those schooled in a harder-edged revolutionary tradition. Behind the lack of definition there is, however, a much sharper point. The lack of definition does not result from theoretical slackness: on the contrary, revolution is essentially anti-definitional.

The traditional Leninist concept of revolution is crucially definitional. At its centre is the idea that the struggles of the working class are inevitably limited in character, that they cannot rise above reformist demands, unless there is the intervention of a revolutionary party. The working class is a 'they' who cannot go beyond certain limits without outside intervention. The self-emancipation of the proletariat is impossible.(38)

The emphasis on dignity puts the unlimited at the centre of picture, not just the undefined but the anti-definitional. Dignity, understood as a category of struggle, is a tension which points beyond itself. The assertion of dignity implies the present negation of dignity. Dignity, then, is the struggle against the denial of dignity, the struggle for the realisation of dignity. Dignity is and is not: it is the struggle against its own negation. If dignity were simply the assertion of something that already is, then it would be an absolutely flabby concept, an empty complacency. To simply assert human dignity as a principle (as in 'all humans have dignity', or 'all humans have a right to dignity') would be either so general as to be meaningless or, worse, so general as to obscure the fact that existing society is based on the negation of dignity.(39) Similarly, if dignity were simply the assertion of something that is not, then it would be an empty daydream or a religious wish. The concept of dignity only gains force if it is understood in its double dimension, as the struggle against its own denial. One is dignified, or true, only by struggling against present indignity, or untruth. Dignity implies a constant moving against the barriers of that which exists, a constant subversion and transcendence of definitions. Dignity, understood as a category of struggle, is a fundamentally anti-identitarian concept: not 'my dignity as a Mexican...', but 'our dignity is our struggle against the negation of that dignity'.

Dignity is not a characteristic peculiar to the indigenous of the south-east of Mexico, nor to those overtly involved in revolutionary struggle. It is simply a characteristic of life in an oppressive society. It is the cry of 'Enough!' (!Ya Basta!) that is inseparable from the experience of oppression. Oppression cannot be total; whatever its form, it is always a pressure which is confronted by a counter-pressure, dehumanisation confronted by humanity. Domination implies resistance, dignity.(40) Dignity is the other side, too often forgotten, too often stifled, of what Marx called alienation: it is the struggle of dis-alienation, of defetishisation.(41) It is the struggle for recognition, but for the recognition of a self currently negated.

Dignity is the lived experience that the world is not so, that that is not the way things are. It is the lived rejection of positivism, of those forms of thought which start from the assumption that 'that's the way things are'. It is the cry of existence of that which has been silenced by 'the world that is', the refusal to be shut out by Is-ness, the scream against being forgotten in the fragmentation of the world into the disciplines of social science, those disciplines which break reality and, in breaking, exclude, suppressing the suppressed. Dignity is the cry of 'here we are!', the 'here we are!' of the indigenous peoples forgotten by neoliberal modernisation, the 'here we are!' of the growing numbers of poor who somehow do not show in the statistics of economic growth and the financial reports, the 'here we are!' of the gay whose sexuality was for so long not recognised, the 'here we are!' of the elderly shut away to die in the retirement homes of the richer countries, the 'here we are!' of the women closed into the houses whose wives they are, the 'here we are!' of the millions of illegal migrants(42) who are not where, officially, they should be, the 'here we are!' of all those pleasures of human life excluded by the growing subjection of humanity to the market. Dignity is the cry of those who are not heard, the voice of those without voice. Dignity is the truth of truth denied.(43)

'Us they forgot more and more, and history was no longer big enough for us to die just like that, forgotten and humiliated. Because dying does not hurt, what hurts is being forgotten. Then we discovered that we no longer existed, that those who govern had forgotten us in the euphoria of statistics and growth rates. A country which forgets itself is a sad country, a country which forgets its past cannot have a future. And then we seized our arms and went into the cities where we were animals. And we went and said to the powerful "here we are!" and to all the country we shouted "here we are!" and to all the world we shouted "here we are!" And see how odd things are because, for them to see us, we covered our faces; for them to name us, we gave up our name; we gambled the present to have a future; and to live ... we died'.(44)

This 'here we are!' is not the 'here we are!' of mere identity. It is a 'here we are!' which derives its meaning from the denial of that presence. It is not a static 'here we are!' but a movement, an assault on the barriers of exclusion. It is the breaking of barriers, the moving against separations, classifications, definitions, the assertion of unities that have been defined out of existence.

Dignity is an assault on the separation of morality and politics, and of the private and the public. Dignity cuts across those boundaries, asserts the unity of what has been sundered. The assertion of dignity is neither a moral nor a political claim: it is rather an attack on the separation of politics and morality that allows formally democratic regimes all over the world to co-exist with growing levels of poverty and social marginalisation. It is the 'here we are!' not just of the marginalised, but of the horror felt by all of us in the face of mass impoverishment and starvation. It is the 'here we are!' not just of the growing numbers shut away in prisons, hospitals and homes, but also of the shame and disgust of all of us who, by living, participate in the bricking up of people in those prisons, hospitals and homes. Dignity is an assault on the conventional definition of politics, but equally on the acceptance of that definition in the instrumental conception of revolutionary politics which has for so long subordinated the personal to the political, with such disastrous results. Probably nothing has done more to undermine the 'Left' in this century than this separation of the political and the personal, of the public and the private, and the dehumanisation that it entails.

Dignity encapsulates in one word the rejection of the separation of the personal and the political.(45) To a remarkable extent, this group of rebels in the jungle of the south-east of Mexico have crystallised and advanced the themes of oppositional thought and action that have been discussed throughout the world in recent years: the issues of gender, age, childhood, death and the dead. All flow from the understanding of politics as a politics of dignity, a politics which recognises the particular oppression of, and respects the struggles of, women, children, the old. Respect for the struggles of the old is a constant theme of Marcos's stories, particularly through the figure of Old Antonio, but was also forcefully underlined by the emergence of Comandante Trinidad as one of the leading figures in the dialogue of San Andres. The way in which women have imposed recognition of their struggles on the Zapatista men is well known, and can be seen, for example, in the Revolutionary Law for Women, issued on the first day of the uprising, or in the fact that it was a woman, Ana Maria, who led the most important military action undertaken by the Zapatistas, the occupation of the occupation of the town hall in San Cristobal on the 1st January 1994.(46) The question of childhood and the freedom to play is a constant theme in Marcos's letters. The stories, jokes, and poetry of the communiques and the dances that punctuate all that the Zapatistas do are not embellishments of a revolutionary process but central to it.

The struggle of dignity is the 'here we are!' of jokes, poetry, dancing, old age, childhood, games, death, love - of all those things excluded by serious bourgeois politics and serious revolutionary politics alike. As such, the struggle of dignity is opposed to the state. The Zapatista movement is an anti-state movement, not just in the obvious sense that the EZLN took up arms against the Mexican state, but in the much more profound sense that their forms of organisation, action and discourse are non-state, or, more precisely, anti-state forms.

The state defines and classifies and, by so doing, excludes. This is not by chance. The state, any state, embedded as it is in the global web of capitalist social relations, functions in such a way as to reproduce the capitalist status quo.(47) In its relation to us, and in our relation to it, there is a filtering out of anything that is not compatible with the reproduction of capitalist social relations. This may be a violent filtering, as in the repression of revolutionary or subversive activity, but it is also and above all a less perceptible filtering, a sidelining or suppression of passions, loves, hates, anger, laughter, dancing. Discontent is redefined as demands and demands are classified and defined, excluding all that is not reconcilable with the reproduction of capitalist social relations. The discontented are classified in the same way, the undigestable excluded with a greater or lesser degree of violence. The cry of dignity, the 'here we are!' of the unpalatable and undigestable, can only be a revolt against classification, against definition as such.

The state is pure Is-ness, pure Identity. Power says 'I am who am, the eternal repetition'.(48) The state is the great Classifier. Power says to the rebels: 'Be ye not awkward, refuse not to be classified. All that cannot be classified counts not, exists not, is not.'(49) The struggle of the state against the Zapatistas since the declaration of the cease-fire has been a struggle to define, to classify, to limit; the struggle of the Zapatistas against the state has been the struggle to break out, to break the barriers, to overflow, to refuse definition or to accept-and-transcend definition.

The dialogue between the government and the EZLN, first in San Cristobal in March 1994, and then in San Andres Larrainzar since April 1995, has been a constant double movement. The government has constantly sought to define and limit the Zapatista movement, to 'make it small', as one of the government representatives put it. It has constantly sought to define zapatismo as a movement limited to Chiapas, with no right to discuss matters of wider importance. It did sign agreements on the question of indigenous rights and autonomy, but apparently without having at the time any intention of implementing them.(50) In the section of the dialogue devoted to democracy and justice, however, the government representatives made no serious contribution and have apparently no intention of signing agreements in this area. The Zapatistas, on the other hand, have constantly used the dialogue to break out, to overcome their geographical isolation in the Lacandon Jungle. They have done this partly through their daily press conferences during the sessions of the dialogue, but also by negotiating the procedural right to invite advisers and guests and then inviting hundreds of them to participate in the sessions on indigenous rights and culture and on democracy and justice: advisers from a very wide range of indigenous and community organisations, complemented by a wide range of academics. Each of the two topics also provided the basis for organising a Forum in San Cristobal, first on Indigenous Rights and Culture in January 1996 and then on the Reform of the State in July of the same year, both attended by a very large number of activists from all over the country.

On the one hand, the government's drive to limit, define, make small; on the other, the (generally very successful) Zapatista push to break the cordon. On the one hand, a politics of definition, on the other a politics of overflowing. This does not mean that the Zapatistas have not sought to define: on the contrary, the definition of constitutional reforms to define indigenous autonomy is seen by them as an important achievement. But it has been a definition that overflows, thematically and politically. The definition of indigenous rights is seen not as an end-point, but as a start, as a basis for moving on to other areas of change, but also as a basis for taking the movement forward, a basis for breaking out.

The difference in approach between the two sides of the dialogue has at times resulted in incidents which reflect not only the arrogance of the government negotiators but also the lack of understanding derived from their perspective as representatives of the state. This has even been expressed in the conception of time. Given the bad conditions of communication in the Lacandon Jungle, and the need to discuss everything thoroughly, the Zapatista principle of 'mandar obedeciendo' ('to command obeying') means that decisions take time. When the government representatives insisted on rapid replies, the Zapatistas replied that they did not understand the indigenous clock. As recounted by Comandante David afterwards, the Zapatistas explained that 'we, as Indians, have rhythms, forms of understanding, of deciding, of reaching agreements. And when we told them that, they replied by making fun of us; well then, they said, we don't understand why you say that because we see that you have Japanese watches, so how do you say that you use the indigenous clock, that's from Japan.'(51) And Comandante Tacho commented: 'They haven't learned. They understand us backwards. We use time, not the clock.'(52)

Even more fundamentally, the state representatives have been unable to understand the concept of dignity. In one of the press conferences held during the dialogue of San Andres, Comandante Tacho recounts that the government negotiators 'told us that they are studying what dignity means, that they are consulting and making studies on dignity. That what they understood was that dignity is service to others. And they asked us to tell them what we understand by dignity. We told them to continue with their research. It makes us laugh and we laughed in front of them. They asked us why and we told them that they have big research centres and big studies in schools of a high standard and that it would be a shame if they do not accept that. We told them that if we sign the peace, then we will tell them at the end what dignity means for us.'(53)

The Zapatista sense of satire and their refusal to be defined is turned not only against the state, but also against the more traditional 'definitional' left. In a letter dated 20 February 1995, when the Zapatistas were retreating from the army after the military intervention of 9 February, Marcos imagines an interrogation by the state prosecutor, consisting of the prosecutor's accusations and his own responses:

'The whites accuse you of being black: Guilty. The blacks accuse you of being white: Guilty... The machos accuse you of being feminist: Guilty. The feminists accuse you of being macho: Guilty. The communists accuse you of being an anarchist: Guilty. The anarchists accuse you of being orthodox: Guilty... The reformists accuse you of being an extremist: Guilty. The 'historical vanguard' accuse you of appealing to civil society and not to the proletariat: Guilty. Civil society accuse you of disturbing its tranquility: Guilty. The stock market accuses you of spoiling their lunch: Guilty... The serious people accuse you of being a joker: Guilty. The jokers accuse you of being serious: Guilty. The adults accuse you of being a child: Guilty. The children accuse you of being an adult: Guilty. The orthodox leftists accuse you for not condemning homosexuals and lesbians: Guilty. The theorists accuse you for being practical: Guilty. The practitioners accuse you for being theoretical: Guilty. Everybody accuses you for everything bad that happens to them: Guilty.'(54)

Dignity's revolt mocks classification. As it must. It must, because dignity makes sense only if understood as being-and-not-being, and therefore defying definition or classification. Dignity is that which pushes from itself towards itself, and cannot be reduced to a simple 'is'. The state, any state, on the other hand, is. The state, as its name suggests, imposes a state, an Is-ness, upon that which pushes beyond existing social relations. Dignity is a moving outwards, an overflowing, a fountain; the state is a moving inwards, a containment, a cistern.(55) The failure to understand dignity, then, is not peculiar to the Mexican state: it is simply that statehood and dignity are incompatible. There is no fit between them.

Dignity's revolt, therefore, cannot aim at winning state power. >From the beginning, the Zapatistas made it clear that they did not want to win power, and they have repeated it ever since. Many on the more traditional 'definitional' Left were scandalised when the repudiation of winning power gained more concrete expression in the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle at the beginning of 1996, when the Zapatistas launched the formation of the Zapatista Front of National Liberation (FZLN) and made the rejection of all ambition to hold state office a condition of membership.(56) The repudiation of state power is, however, simply an extension of the idea of dignity. The state, any state, is so bound into the web of global capitalist social relations that it has no option, whatever the composition of the government, but to promote the reproduction of those relations, and that means defining and degrading. To assume state power would inevitably be to abandon dignity. The revolt of dignity can only aim at abolishing the state or, more immediately, at developing alternative forms of social organisation and strengthening anti-state power. 'It is not necessary to conquer the world. It is enough to make it anew'.(57)

The central principles on which the Zapatistas have insisted in developing alternative forms of social organisation are those of 'mandar obedeciendo' ('to command obeying') and 'preguntando caminamos' ('asking we walk'). They have emphasised time and time again the importance for them of taking all important decisions through a collective process of discussion, and that the way forward cannot be a question of their imposing their line, but only through opening up spaces for discussion and democratic decision, in which they would express their view, but their view should count only as one among many. In relation to the state (and assuming that the state still exists), they have said many times that they do not want to hold state office, and that it does not matter which party holds state office as long as those in authority 'command obeying'. The problem of revolutionary politics, then, is not to win power but to develop forms of political articulation that would force those in office to obey the people (so that, fully developed, the separation between state and society would be overcome and the state effectively abolished). Just what this would mean has not been spelt out by the EZLN,(58) apart from the obvious principle of instant recallability: that the president or any other office-holder should be instantly recallable if they fail to obey the people's wishes, as is the case with all the members of the EZLN's ruling body, the CCRI.(59)

Although the details are not clear, and cannot be, since they could only be developed in struggle, the central point is that the focus of revolutionary struggle is shifted from the what to the how of politics. All the initiatives of the Zapatistas (the Convencion Nacional Democratica, the 'consultation' on the future of the EZLN, the invitation of advisers to the dialogue with the government, the organisation of the forum on indigenous rights and culture and on the reform of the state, the intercontinental meeting for humanity and against neoliberalism, amongst others) have been directed at promoting a different way of thinking about political activity. Similarly, all the contacts with the state and even the proposals for the 'reform' of the state have in fact been anti-state initiatives in the sense of trying to develop new political forms, forms of action which articulate dignity, forms which do not fit with the state. The principal problem for a revolutionary movement is not to elaborate a programme, to say what the revolutionary government will do (although the EZLN has its 16 demands as the basis for such a programme); the principal problem is rather how to articulate dignities, how to develop a form of struggle and a form of social organisation based upon the recognition of dignity. Only the articulation of dignities can provide the answer to what should be done: a self-determining society must determine itself.

V

Dignities unite.

The Zapatistas rose up on the first of January 1994 in order to change Mexico and to make the world anew. Their base was in the Lacandon Jungle, far away from any important urban centre. They were not part of an effective international or even national organisation.(60) Since the declaration of the cease-fire on the 12th January 1994, they have remained physically cordoned within the Lacandon Jungle.

Cut off in the jungle, how could the EZLN transform Mexico, or indeed change the world? Alone there was little that they could do, either to change the world, or even to defend themselves. 'Do not leave us alone' ('no nos dejen solos') was an oft-repeated call during the first months of the cease-fire. The effectiveness of the EZLN depended (and depends) inevitably on their ability to break the cordon and overcome their isolation. The revolt of dignity derives its strength from the uniting of dignities.

But how could this uniting of dignities come about when the EZLN itself was cornered in the jungle and there was no institutional structure to support them? Marcos suggests a powerful image in a radio interview in the early months of the uprising: 'Marcos, whoever Marcos is, who is in the mountains, had his twins, or comrades, or his accomplices (not in the organic sense, but accomplices in terms of how to see the world, the necessity of changing it or seeing it in a different way) in the media, for example, in the newspapers, in the radio, in the television, in the journals, but also in the trade unions, in the schools, among the teachers, among the students, in groups of workers, in peasant organisations and all that. There were many accomplices or, to use a radio term, there were many people tuned in to the same frequency, but nobody turned the radio on... Suddenly they [the comrades of the EZLN] turn it on and we discover that there are others on the same radio frequency - I'm talking of radio communication, not listening to the radio - and we begin to talk and to communicate and to realise that there are things in common, that it seems there are more things in common than differences.'(61)

The idea suggested by Marcos for thinking about the unity of struggles is one of frequencies, of being tuned in, of wavelengths, vibrations, echoes. Dignity resonates. As it vibrates, it sets off vibrations in other dignities, an unstructured, possibly discordant resonance.

There is no doubt of the extraordinary resonance of the Zapatista uprising throughout the world, as evidenced by the participation of over three thousand people from forty-three different countries in the Intercontinental Meeting organised by the EZLN in July 1996. 'What is happening in the mountains of the Mexican southeast that finds an echo and a mirror in the streets of Europe, the suburbs of Asia, the countryside of America, the towns of Africa and the houses of Oceania?'(62) And equally, of course, what is happening in the streets of Europe, the suburbs of Asia, the countryside of America, the towns of Africa and the houses of Oceania, that resonates so strongly with the Zapatista uprising?

The notion of resonance, or echo, or radio frequency may seem a very vague one. It is not so. The EZLN have engaged in a constant struggle over the past few years to break through the cordon, to overcome their isolation, to forge the unity of dignities on which their future depends. They have fought in many different ways. They have fought, with enormous success, by letters and communiques, by jokes and stories, by the use of symbolism(63) and by the theatre of their events. They have fought by the construction of their 'Aguascalientes', the meeting place constructed for the National Democratic Convention (Convencion Nacional Democratica) in July 1994, and by the construction of a series of new Aguascalientes in the jungle after the first one had been destroyed by the army in its intervention of February 1995. They have fought too by the creative organisation of a whole series of events which have been important catalysts for the opposition in Mexico and (increasingly) beyond Mexico. The first important event was the National Democratic Convention, organised immediately the EZLN had rejected the proposals made by the government in the Dialogue of San Cristobal and held just weeks before the presidential elections of August 1994: an event which brought more than 6,000 activists into the heart of the jungle only months after the fighting had finished. The following year, the EZLN built on the popular reaction to the military interventon of February 1995 to organise a consultation throughout the country on what the future of the EZLN should be, an event in which over a million people took part. The new dialogue with the government, begun in April 1995, also became the basis for inviting hundreds of activists and specialists to take part as advisers in the dialogue, and for organising the forums on Indigenous rights and culture (January 1996) and on the Reform of the State (July 1996). The same year also saw the organisation of the Intercontinental Meeting for Humanity and against Neoliberalism, held within the Zapatista territory at the end of July. In each case, these were events which seemed impossible at the time of their announcement, and events which stirred up enormous enthusiasm in their realisation.

The communiques and events have also been accompanied by more orthodox attempts to establish lasting organisational structures. The National Democratic Convention (CND) established a standing organisation of the same name, with the aim of coordinating the (non-military) Zapatista struggle for democracy, freedom and justice throughout the country. After internal conflicts had rendered the CND ineffective, the Third Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle in January 1995 proposed the creation of a Movement for National Liberation, an organisation which was stillborn. The Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, a year later, launched the Frente Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (the Zapatista National Liberation Front - FZLN) to organise the civilian struggle thoughout the country. This, although it has provided an important point of organisational support for the Zapatistas, has stirred up none of the enthusiasm aroused by the EZLN itself.

The relative failure of the institutional attempts to extend the Zapatista struggle lends weight to the argument that the real force of the Zapatista uniting of dignities has to be understood in terms of the much less structured notion of resonance. The notion of resonance is indeed the counterpart of the idea of 'preguntando caminamos' ('asking we walk'). We advance by asking, not by telling: by suggesting, arguing, proposing, inviting, looking for links with other struggles which are the same struggle, looking for responses, listening for echoes. If those echoes are not there, we can only propose again, argue again, probe again, ask again: we cannot create echoes where they do not exist.

All this does not mean that organisation is not important, that it is all just a matter of vibrations and spontaneous combustion. On the contrary, the whole Zapatista uprising shows the importance of profound and careful organisation. It does suggest, however, a different, less structured and more experimental way of thinking about organisation. The concept of organisation must be experimental in a double sense: experimental, simply because there is no pre-given model of revolutionary organisation, but also experimental in the sense that the notion of dignity and its corollary, 'asking we walk', mean that revolutionary organisation must be seen as a constant experiment, a constant asking. The notion of dignity does not imply an appeal to spontaneity, the idea that revolt will simply explode without prior organisation; but it does imply thinking in terms of a multitude of different forms of organisation and, above all, thinking of organisation as a constant experiment, a constant probing, a constant asking, a constant searching: not just to see if together we can find some way out of here, but because the asking is in itself the antithesis of Power.(64)

Yet there is obviously a tension here implied in the very notion of the 'uniting of dignities'. The Zapatistas speak, not just of 'dignity', but of 'dignities'. Clearly, then, it is not a question of imposing one dignity or of finding what 'true dignity' really means. It is a question rather of recognising the validity of different forms of struggle and different opinions as to what the realisation of dignity means. This does not mean a complete relativism in which all opinions, even fascist ones, are granted equal validity. Conflicts between different dignities are inevitable: it is clear, for example, that the Zapatista women's understanding of the dignity of their struggle has brought them into conflict with the men's understanding of their dignity.(65) What the concept of dignity points to is not the correctness of any particular solution to such conflicts, but rather a way of resolving such conflicts in which the particular dignities are recognised and articulated. Even here, the Zapatistas argue that there is not just one correct way of articulating dignities: while they themselves organise their discussions on the basis of village assemblies, they recognise that this may not be the best form of articulating dignities in all cases. What form the articulation of dignities might take in a big city, for example, is very much an open question, although there are obviously precedents(66) and, in some cases, deep-rooted traditions of forms of direct democracy. The struggle to unite dignities in a world that is based on the denial and fragmentation of dignities is not an easy one.

VI

Dignity is the revolutionary subject.
Dignity is a class concept, not a humanistic one.

The EZLN do not use the concept of 'class' or 'class struggle' in their discourse, in spite of the fact that Marxist theory has clearly played an important part in their formation. They have preferred, instead, to develop a new language, to speak of the struggle of truth and dignity. 'We saw that the old words had become so worn out that they had become harmful for those that used them.'(67) In looking for support, or in forming links with other struggles, they have appealed, not to the working class or the proletariat, but to 'civil society'. By 'civil society', they seem to mean 'society in struggle', in the broadest sense: all those groups and intitiatives engaged in latent or overt struggles to assert some sort of control over their future, without aspiring to hold governmental office.(68) In Mexico, the initial reference point is often taken as the forms of autonomous social organisation that arose in Mexico City in response to the earthquake of 1985 and the state's incapacity to deal with the emergency.

It is not difficult to see why the Zapatistas should have chosen to turn their back on the old words. That does not mean, however, that all the problems connected with these words are thereby erased. The Zapatistas have been criticised by some adherents of the traditional orthodox Marxist left for not using the concept of class. It is argued that, because they do not use the traditional triad of class struggle, revolution and socialism, preferring instead to speak of dignity, truth, freedom, democracy and justice, their struggle is a liberal one, an armed reformism which has little possibility of leading to radical change. An extreme form of this sort of application of a class analysis is the argument that the Zapatista uprising is just a peasant movement and, while it should be supported, the proletariat can have little confidence in it.

The orthodox Marxist tradition works with a definitional concept of class. The working class may be defined in various ways: most commonly as those who sell their labour power in order to survive; or as those who produce surplus value and are directly exploited. The important point here is that the working class is defined.

In this definitional approach, the working class, however defined, is defined on the basis of its subordination to capital: it is because it is subordinated to capital (as wage workers, or as producers of surplus value) that it is defined as working class. Capitalism, in this approach, is understood as a world of pre-defined social relations, a world in which the forms of social relations are constituted,(69) firmly fixed or fetishised. The fixity of the forms of social relations is taken as the starting point for the discussion of class. Thus, working class struggle is understood as starting from the (pre-constituted) subordination of labour to capital. Any sort of struggle that does not fall within this definition is then seen as non-class struggle (which consequently raises problems as to how it should be defined).

The definitional approach to class raises two sorts of problems. Firstly, it inevitably raises the question of who is and who is not part of the working class. Are intellectuals like Marx and Lenin part of the working class? Are those of us who work in the universities part of the working class? Are the rebels of Chiapas part of the working class? Are feminists part of the working class? Are those active in the gay movement part of the working class? In each case, there is a concept of a pre-defined working class to which these people do or do not belong.(70)

The second (and more serious) consequence of defining class is the definition of struggles that follows. From the classification of the people concerned there are derived certain conclusions about the struggles in which they are involved. Those who define the Zapatista rebels as being not part of the working class and draw from that certain conclusions about the nature and limitations of the uprising. From the definition of the class position of the participants there follows a definition of their struggles: the definition of class defines the antagonism that the definer perceives or accepts as valid. This leads to a blinkering of the perception of social antagonism. In some cases, for example, the definition of the working class as the urban proletariat directly exploited in factories, combined with evidence of the decreasing proportion of the population who fall within this definition, has led people to the conclusion that class struggle is no longer relevant for understanding social change. In other cases, the definition of the working class and therefore of working class struggle in a certain way has led to an incapacity to relate to the development of new forms of struggle (the student movement, feminism, ecologism and so on). The definitional understanding of class has done much in recent years to create the situation in which 'the old words had become so worn out that they had become harmful for those that used them'.

The notion of dignity detonates the definition of class, but does not thereby cease to be a class concept. It does so simply because the starting point is no longer a relation of subordination but a relation of struggle, a relation of insubordination/ subordination. The starting point of dignity is the negation of humiliation, the struggle against subordination. From this perspective there does not exist a settled, fixed world of subordination upon which definitions can be constructed. Just the contrary: the notion of dignity points to the fact that we are not just subordinated or exploited, that our existence within capitalist society cannot be understood simply in terms of subordination. Dignity points to the fact that subordination cannot be conceived without its opposite, the struggle against subordination, insubordination. A world of subordination is a world in which subordination is constantly at issue. The forms of social relations in capitalist society cannot be understood simply as fetishised, constituted forms, but only as forms which are always in question, which are imposed only thorugh the unceasing struggle of capital to reproduce itself. Once the starting point is dignity, once the starting point is the struggle to convert 'dignity and rebellion into freedom and dignity', then all that was fixed becomes shaky, all that appeared to be defined becomes blurred.

From the perspective of dignity, then, class cannot be understood as a defined group of people. This is quite consistent with Marx's approach. His understanding of capitalism was based not on the antagonism between two groups of people but on the antagonism in the way in which human social practice is organised. Existence in capitalist society is a conflictual existence, an antagonistic existence. Although this antagonism appears as a vast multiplicity of conflicts, it can be argued (and was argued by Marx) that the key to understanding this antagonism and its development is the fact that present society is built upon an antagonism in the way that the distinctive character of humanity, namely creative activity (work in its broadest sense) is organised. In capitalist society, work is turned against itself, alienated from itself; we lose control over our creative activity. This negation of human creativity takes place through the subjection of human activity to the market. This subjection to the market, in turn, takes place fully when the capacity to work creatively (labour power) becomes a commodity to be sold on the market to those with the capital to buy it. The antagonism between human creativity and its negation thus becomes focused in the antagonism between those who have to sell their creativity and those who appropriate that creativity and exploit it (and, in so doing, transform that creativity into labour). In shorthand, the antagonism between creativity and its negation can be referred to as the conflict between labour and capital, but this conflict (as Marx makes clear) is not a conflict between two external forces, but between work (human creativity) and work alienated.

The social antagonism is thus not in the first place a conflict between two groups of people: it is a conflict between creative social practice and its negation, or, in other words, between humanity and its negation, between the transcending of limits (creation) and the imposition of limits (definition). The conflict, in this interpretation, does not take place after subordination has been established, after the fetishised forms of social relations have been constituted: rather it is a conflict about the subordination of social practice, about the fetishisation of social relations.(71) The conflict is the conflict between subordination and insubordination, and it is this which allows us to speak of insubordination (or dignity) as a central feature of capitalism. Class struggle does not take place within the constituted forms of capitalist social relations: rather the constitution of those forms is itself class struggle. This leads to a much richer concept of class struggle in which the whole of social practice is at issue. All social practice is an unceasing antagonism between the subjection of practice to the fetishised, perverted, defining forms of capitalism and the attempt to live against-and-beyond those forms. There can thus be no question of the existence of non-class forms of struggle.

Class struggle, in this view, is a conflict that permeates the whole of human existence. We all exist within that conflict, just as the conflict exists within all of us. It is a polar antagonism which we cannot escape. We do not 'belong' to one class or another: rather, the class antagonism exists in us, tearing us apart. The antagonism (the class divide) traverses all of us.(72) Nevertheless, it clearly does so in very different ways. Some, the very small minority, participate directly in and/ or benefit directly from the appropriation and exploitation of the work of others. Others, the vast majority of us, are, directly or indirectly, the objects of that appropriation and exploitation. The polar nature of the antagonism is thus reflected in a polarisation of the two classes,(73) but the antagonism is prior to, not subsequent to, the classes: classes are constituted through the antagonism.

Since classes are constituted through the antagonism between work and its alienation, and since this antagonism is constantly changing, it follows that classes cannot be defined. The concept of class is essentially non-definitional. More than that, since definition imposes limits, closes openness, negates creativity, it is possible to say that the capitalist class, even if it cannot be defined, is the defining class, the class that defines, that identifies, that classifies. Labour (the working class, the class that exists in antagonism to capital) is not only incapable of definition but essentially anti-definitional. It is constituted by its repressed creativity: that is to say, by its resistance to the (ultimately impossible) attempt to define it. Not only is it mistaken to try to identify the working class ('are the Zapatistas working class?'), but class struggle itself is the struggle between definition and anti-definition. Capital says 'I am, you are'; labour says 'we are not, but we are becoming; you are, but you will not be': or 'We are/ are not, we struggle to create ourselves'.

Class struggle, then, is the unceasing daily antagonism (whether it be perceived or not) between alienation and dis-alienation, between definition and anti-definition, between fetishisation and de-fetishisation. The trouble with all these terms is that our side of the struggle is presented negatively: as dis-alienation, anti-definition, de-fetishisation. The Zapatistas are right when they say that we need a new language, not just because the 'old words' are 'worn out' but because the Marxist tradition has been so focused on domination that it has not developed adequate words to talk about resistance.(74) Dignity is the term that turns this around, that expresses positively that which is supressed, that for which we are fighting. Dignity is that which knows no Is-ness, no objective structures. Dignity is that which rises against humiliation, dehumanisation, marginalisation, dignity is that which says 'we are here, we are human and we struggle for the humanity that is denied to us'. Dignity is the struggle against capital.

Dignity, then, is the revolutionary subject. Where it is repressed most fiercely, where the antagonism is most intense, and where there is a tradition of communal organisation, it will fight most strongly, as in the factory, as in the jungle. But class struggle, the struggle of dignity, the struggle for humanity against its destruction, is not the privilege of any defined group: we exist in it, just as it exists in us, inescapably. Dignity, then, does not exist in a pure form, any more than the working class exists in a pure form. It is that in us which resists, which rebels, which does not conform. Constantly undermined, constantly smothered and suffocated by the myriad forms of alienation and fetishisation, constantly overlaid and distorted, constantly repressed, fragmented and corrupted by money and the state, constantly in danger of being extinguished, snuffed out, it is the indestructable (or maybe just the not yet destroyed) NO that makes us human. That is why the resonance of the Zapatistas goes so deep: 'as more and more rebel communiques were issued, we realised that in reality the revolt came from the depths of ourselves.'(75) The power of the Zapatistas is the power of the !Ya Basta!, the negation of oppression, which exists in the depths of all of us, the only hope for humanity.

VII

Dignity's revolution is uncertain, ambiguous and contradictory.

Uncertainty permeates the whole Zapatista undertaking. There is none of the sense of the inevitablity of history which has so often been a feature of revolutionary movements of the past. There is no certainty about the arrival at the promised land, nor any certainty about what this promised land might look like. It is a revolution that walks asking, not answering.

Revolution in the Zapatista sense is a moving outwards rather than a moving towards. But how can such a movement be revolutionary? How can such a movement bring about a radical social transformation? The very idea of social revolution is already greatly discredited at the end of the twentieth century: how does the Zapatista uprising help us to find a way forward?

There is a problem at the heart of any concept of revolution. How could it be possible for those who are currently alienated (or humiliated) to create a world of non-alienation (or dignity)? If we are all permeated by the conditions of social oppression in which we live, and if our perceptions are constrained by those conditions, shall we not always reproduce those conditions in everything we do? If our existence is traversed by relations of power, how can we possibly create a society that is not characterised by power relations?

The simplest way out of this problem is to solve it by bringing in a saviour, a deus ex machina. If there is some sort of figure who has broken free of alienation and come to a true understanding, then that figure can perhaps lead the masses out of the present alienated society. This is essentially the idea of the vanguard party proposed by Lenin:(76) a group of people who by virtue of their theoretical and practical experience can see beyond the confines of existing society and who, for that reason, can lead the masses in a revolutionary break. There are, however, two basic problems. How is it possible for anyone, no matter what their training, to so lift themselves above existing society that they do not reproduce in their own action the concepts and faults of that society? Even more fundamental: how is it possible to create a self-creative society other than through the self-emancipation of society itself? The experience of revolution in the twentieth century suggests that these are very grave problems indeed.

However, if the notion of a vanguard is discarded, and with it the notion of a revolutionary programme, which depends on the existence of such a vanguard, then what are we left with? The Leninist solution may have been wrong, but it was an attempt to solve a perceived problem: the problem of how you bring about a radical transformation of society in a society in which, apparently, the mass of people are so imbued with contemporary values that self-emancipation seems impossible. For many, the failure of the Leninist solution proves the impossibility of social revolution, the inevitability of conforming.

The Zapatista answer is focused on the notion of dignity. The notion of dignity points to the contradictory nature of existence. We are humiliated but have the dignity to struggle against the humiliation to realise our dignity. We are imbued with capitalist values, but also live a daily antagonism towards those values. We are alienated but still have sufficient humanity to struggle against alienation for a non-alienated world. Alienation is, but it is not, because dis-alienation is not but also is. Oppression exists, but it exists as struggle. It is the present existence of dignity (as struggle) that makes it possible to conceive of revolution without a vanguard party. The society based on dignity already exists in the form of the struggle against the negation of dignity.(77) Dignity implies self-emancipation.

The consistent pursuit of dignity in a society based on the denial of dignity is in itself revolutionary. But it implies a different concept of revolution from the 'storming the winter palace' concept that we have grown up with. There is no building of the revolutionary party, no strategy for world revolution, no transitional programme. Revolution is simply the constant, uncompromising struggle for that which cannot be achieved under capitalism: dignity, control over our own lives.

Revolution can only be thought of in this scheme as the cumulative uniting of dignities, the snowballing of struggles, the refusal of more and more people to subordinate their humanity to the degradations of capitalism. This implies a more open concept of revolution: the snowballing of struggles cannot be programmed or predicted. Revolution is not just a future event, but the complete inversion of the relation between dignity and degradation in the present, the cumulative assertion of power over our own lives, the progressive construction of autonomy. As long as capitalism exists (and as long as money exists), the degradation of dignity, the exploitation of work, the dehumanisation and immiseration of existence will continue: the assertion of dignity clearly comes into immediate conflict with the reproduction of capitalism. This conflict could only be resolved by the complete destruction of capitalism. What form this might take, how the cumulative uniting of dignities could lead to the abolition of capitalism, is not clear. It cannot be clear if it is to be a self-creative process. What is clear is that the experience of the last hundred years suggests that social transformation cannot be brought about by the conquest (be it 'democratic' or 'undemocratic') of state power.

This notion is not reformist, if by reformism is meant the idea that social transformation can be achieved through the accretion of state-sponsored reforms. Anti-reformism is not a question of the clarity of future goals but of the strength with which those forms (especially the state) which reproduce capitalist social relations are rejected in the present. It is a question not of a future programme but of present organisation.

An uncertain revolution is, however, an ambiguous and contradictory revolution. Openness and uncertainty are built in to the Zapatista concept of revolution. And that openness means also contradictions and ambiguities. At times it looks as if the EZLN might accept a settlement that falls far short of their dreams, at times the presentation of their aims is more limited, apparently more containable. Certainly, both the direction and the appeal of the uprising would be strengthened if it were made explicit that exploitation is central to the systematic negation of dignity and that dignity's struggle is a struggle against exploitation in all its forms. The very nature of the Zapatista concept of revolution means that the movement is particularly open to the charge of ambiguity. Yet historical experience suggests that ambiguities and contradictions are deep-rooted in any revolutionary process, no matter how clearly defined the line of the leadership. Rather than deny the contradictions, it seems better to focus on the forms of articulation and political experiment that might resolve those contradictions. It is better to recognise, as Tacho does, that in undertaking revolution, the Zapatistas are 'going to classes in a school that does not exist'.(78)

But what do the EZLN want? What is their dream of the future? Clearly, there are many dreams of the future: 'For one it can be that there should be land for everybody to work, which for the peasant is the central problem, no? In reality they are very clear that all the other problems turn on the question of land: housing, health, schools, services. Everything that makes them leave the land is bad and everything that lets them stay on it is good. To stay with dignity'.(79) That is a dream of the future, a simple dream perhaps, but its realisation would require enormous changes in the organisation of society.

Or again, in another interview, Marcos explains the Zapatista dream in these terms: 'in our dream the children are children and their work is to be children. Here no, in reality, in the reality of Chiapas the work of the children is to be adults, from the time they are born and that is not right, we say that that is not right.... My dream is not of agricultural redistribution, the great mobilisations, the fall of the government and elections and a party of the left wins, whatever. In my dream, I dream of the children and I see them being children. If we achieve that, that the children in any part of Mexico are children and nothing else, we've won. Whatever it costs, that is worth it. It doesn't matter what social regime is in power, or what political party is in government, or what the exchange rate between the peso and the dollar is, or how the stock market is doing, or whatever. If a child of five years can be a child, as children of five years should be, with that we are on the other side.... We, the Zapatista children, think that our work as children is to play and learn. And the children here do not play, they work.'(80) Again a simple dream, possibly to some a reformist dream, but one that is totally incompatible with the current direction of the world, in which the exploitation of children (child labour, child prostitution, child pornography, for example) is growing at an alarming rate. This dream of children being children is a good example of the power of the notion of dignity: the consistent pursuit of the dream would require a complete transformation of society.

A society based on dignity would be an honest, mutually recognitive society, in which people 'do not have to use a mask ... in order to relate with other people'.(81) It would also be an absolutely self-creative society. In an interview for the Venice Film Festival, Marcos replied to the standard question, 'what is it that the EZLN wants?': 'We want life to be like a cinema poster from which we can choose a different film each day. Now we have risen in arms because, for more than 500 years, they have forced us to watch the same film every day'.(82)

There are no five-year plans here, no blueprint for the new society, no pre-defined utopia. There are no guarantees.

There are no guarantees, no certainties. Openness and uncertainty are built in to the Zapatista concept of revolution. And that openness means also contradictions and ambiguities. At times it looks as if the EZLN might accept a settlement that falls far short of their dreams, at times the presentation of their aims is more limited, apparently more containable. These contradictions and ambiguities are part and parcel of the Zapatista concept of revolution, of the idea of a revolution that walks asking. Inevitably, the contradictions and ambiguities are part of the development of the movement, and undoubtedly it is possible to sustain interpretations of zapatismo that are more restricted than the one offered here. The argument here is an attempt to distill rather than to analyse. Our question is not 'what will happen to the EZLN?' but 'what will happen to us?' Or rather not 'happen to' since the whole point is that we are not 'happened to': how will we (not 'they') change the world? How can we change a world in which capitalism starves thousands of people to death each day, in which the systematic killing of street children in certain cities is organised as the only way of upholding the concept of private property in the world, in which the unleashed horrors of neoliberalism are hurtling humanity towards self-destruction?

And what if they fail? By the time this is published, there is no guarantee that the EZLN will still exist. It may be that the Mexican government will have launched an open military assault (already tried on the 9 February 1995 and an always present threat): it is even possible that the army could be successful, more successful than the last time they tried it. It is also possible that the EZLN will become exhausted: that they will be drawn by tiredness, by their own ambiguities or by the simple lack of response from civil society into limiting their demands and settling for definitions. All of these are possible. The important point, though, is that the Zapatistas are not 'they': they are 'we' - we are 'we'. When the huge crowds who demonstrated in Mexico City and elsewhere after the army intervention of 9 February 1995 chanted 'we are all Marcos', they were not announcing an intention to join the EZLN. They were saying that the struggle of the Zapatistas is the life-struggle of all of us, that we are all part of their struggle and their struggle is part of us, wherever we are. As Major Ana-Maria put it in the opening speech of the Intercontinental Meeting: 'Behind us are the we that are you.(83) Behind our balaclavas is the face of all the excluded women. Of all the forgotten indigenous people. Of all the persecuted homosexuals. Of all the despised youth. Of all the beaten migrants. Of all those imprisoned for their word and thought. Of all the humiliated workers. Of all those who have died from being forgotten. Of all the simple and ordinary men and women who do not count, who are not seen, who are not named, who have no tomorrow.'(84)

We are all Zapatistas. The Zapatistas of Chiapas have lit a flame, but the struggle to convert 'dignity and rebellion into freedom and dignity' is ours.

Libcom note: A critique of this article by Wildcat Germany is linked below, followed by a reply from John Holloway.

Notes

1) EZLN, La Palabra de los Armados de Verdad y Fuego, (Mexico City: Editorial Fuenteovejuna, 1994/ 1995), Vol. 1, pp.31-32. The three volumes of this series are a collection of the interviews, letters and communiques of the EZLN during 1994, an invaluable source. All translations of Spanish quotations are by the author.

2) EZLN, La Palabra, Vol 1, p. 35.

3) Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee.

4) The Council 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance.

5) EZLN, La Palabra, Vol 1, p.122; emphasis in the original. The continuing importance of this passage was underlined when it was quoted by Comandante Ramona in her speech to a meeting in Mexico City on 16 February 1997 organised to protest against the government's failure to fulfill the Agreements of San Andres.

6) Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional: Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

7) Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, 17th November 1994: EZLN, La Palabra, Vol. III, p. 224. Subcomandante Marcos is the spokesperson and military leader of the EZLN. He is, however, subordinate to the CCRI, a popularly elected body. "Mestizos" are people of mixed indigenous and European origin - the vast majority of the Mexican population.

8) Forces of National Liberation.

9) Quoted in C. Tello Diaz, La Rebelion de las Canadas (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1995) pp. 97, 99.

10) The EZLN's reply to the government's claim is contained in a communique of 9 February 1995: 'In relation to the connections of the EZLN with the organisation called "Forces of National Liberation", the EZLN has declared in interviews, letters and communiques that members of different armed organisations of the country came together in its origin, that the EZLN was born from that and, gradually, was appropriated by the indigenous communities to the point where they took the political and military leadership of the EZLN. To the name of the "Forces of National Liberation", the government should add as the antecedents of the EZLN those of all the guerrilla organisations of the 70s and 80s, Arturo Gamiz, Lucio Cabanas, Genaro Vazquez Rojas, Emiliano Zapato, Francisco Villa, Vicente Guerrero, Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, Benito Juarez and many others whom they have already erased from the history books because a people with memory is a rebel people". La Jornada, 13 February 1995.

11) Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, 'Carta a Adolfo Gilly', Viento del Sur, no.4 (summer 1995) pp. 21-25, at p. 25.

12) See the account given by Tello, La Rebelion, p. 105, of the meeting between some of the insurgent leaders and the community of the ejido of San Francisco on 23 September 1985.

13) See the account given by Marcos in an interview with Radio UNAM, 18 March 1994: EZLN, La Palabra, Vol. II, p. 69. The 'white guards' are paid paramilitary groups who, often in collusion with the authorities, suppress protest and dissent with violence.

14) For a discussion of the transformations in the EZLN, see the chapter by Luis Lorenzano in this volume.

15) Decree of the Lacandon Community. See Tello, La Rebelion, pp. 59ff.

16) For a discussion of the significance of 'community', see the chapter by King and Villanueva in this volume.

17) Radio UNAM interview with Marcos, 18 March 1994: EZLN, La Palabra, Vol. II, p.69-70.

18) Marcos, Letter to children of a boarding school in Guadalajara, 8 February 1994: EZLN, La Palabra, Vol. I, p. 179.

19) Radio UNAM interview with Marcos, 18 March 1994, EZLN, La Palabra, Vol. II, p. 62.

20) Marcos interview with Cristian Calonico Lucio, 11 November 1995, ms. p. 47. The interview is unpublished in written form, but formed the basis of a video.

21) Ernst Bloch's Naturrecht und Menschliche Wuerde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1961) is a notable exception. Although theoretically very relevant, it probably did not exercise any influence on the Zapatistas.

22) In a recent interview, Marcos confirms that it was as a result of the integration of the revolutionaries with the indigenous communities that they started using the concept of dignity. 'More than the redistribution of wealth or the expropriation of the means of production, revolution starts to be the possibility that human beings can have a space of dignity. Dignity begins to be a very strong word. It is not our contribution, it is not a contribution of the urban element, it is the communities who contribute it. Such that revolution should be the assurance that dignity be realised, be respected.' Yvon Le Bot, El Sueno Zapatista (The Zapatista Dream) (Mexico City: Plaza & Janes, 1997) p. 146.

23) See for example the interview of Marcos with correspondents of the Proceso, El Financiero and The New York Times, February 1994: EZLN, La Palabra, Vol.I, p. 204, at p. 216.

24) G. Camu Urzua and D. Totoro Taulis, EZLN: el ejercito que salio de la selva (Mexico City: Editorial Planeta, 1994) p. 83.

25) Camu and Totoro, EZLN.

26) The supreme example of the instrumentalist theory of revolution is, of course, Lenin's What is to be Done?

27) See the CCRI communique of 10 June 1994: EZLN, La Palabra, Vol.II, 201.

28) EZLN, La Palabra, Vol.I, p.5.

29) See the account given by Tello, La Rebelion, p. 151; see also Le Bot, El Sueno, p. 191.

30) National Indigenous Congress.

31) At the time of writing, the agreement still has not been implemented by the government.

32) On the refusal of the Zapatistas to define their movement as an indigenous movement, see Le Bot, El Sueno, p. 206, where Marcos says in interview: 'The principal preoccupation of the Committee [CCRI] and of the delegates was that the movement should not be reduced to the indigenous question. On the contrary, if it had been up to them, at least to that part of the committee [those who come from the areas with the strongest traditions] our discourse would have abandoned completely any reference to the indigenous.'

33) The Zapatista use of national symbols, such as the Mexican flag and the national anthem, disconcerted some, especially of the European participants in the recent Intercontinental Gathering in Chiapas. For a critique of the alleged 'nationalism' of the EZLN, see, for example, Sylvie Deneuve, Charles Reeve and Marc Geoffroy, Au-dela des passe-montagnes du Sud-Est mexicain (Paris: Ab irato, 1996); and Katerina, 'Mexico is not only Chiapas nor is the rebellion in Chiapas merely a Mexican affair', Common Sense, no. 22 (winter 1997).

34) In this sense, for example, see the Third Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (1st January, 1995): "The indigenous question will not be solved unless there is a RADICAL transformation of the national pact. The only way to incorporate, with justice and dignity, the indigenous peoples into the nation is by recognising the peculiar characteristics of their social, cultural and political organisation. The autonomies are not a separation but rather the integration of the most humiliated and forgotten minorities into contemporary Mexico. That is how the EZLN has understood it since its formation and tha is how the indigenous bases which form the leadership of our oranisation have directed. Today we repeat it: OUR STRUGGLE IS NATIONAL": La Jornada, 2 January 1995, p.5.

35) La Jornada, 30 January 1996, p. 12.

36) This is, of course, not the only interpretation possible. See, for example, S. Deneuve et al., Au-dela des passe-montagnes. Although it seems incorrect to interpret the Zapatista use of national liberation in the narrow, statist sense, there is no doubt that the term 'national liberation' opens up an enormous, and dangerous, area of ambiguity, simply because the notion of 'nation' and 'state' have been so interwoven that it is difficult to disentangle them completely. It is argued below that the undoubted contradictions and tensions in the discourse of the Zapatistas are not the result of eclecticism, but are the outcome of the consistent pursuit of the principle of dignity. They are not necessarily less serious for that. For a further discussion of Zapatista nationalism, see REDaktion (Hrsg), Chiapas und die Internationale der Hoffnung (Cologne: Neuer ISP-Verlag, 1997), pp. 178-184.

37) Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, "Mexico: La Luna entre los espejos de la noche y el cristal del dia", La Jornada, 9/10/11 June 1995, p. 17 (11 June).

38) This is most clearly elaborated in Lenin's What is to be Done? For example: 'We said that there could not yet be Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. This consciousness could only be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness... The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophical, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals': V.I.Lenin, 'What is to be Done' in Essential Works of Lenin (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), p. 74.

39) The notion of dignity is little used by mainstream political theory. Where it is used, it is often connected with notions of self-ownership (for example, Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 334) or self-possession (for example, Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) p. 279). The use of the term in mainstream political theory and philosophy differs crucially from the Zapatista concept in two respects: firstly, its primary point of reference is the individual; and, secondly, it refers to an abstract, indeterminate and idealised present in which it is assumed that people already have the 'right' to dignity. At best, this is a sort of flabby wishful thinking which has little to do with the Zapatista concept of dignity as struggle against the denial of dignity, and is far removed indeed from seeing 'our fathers with fury in their hands'.

40) See, for example, James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

41) This argument is developed in section V.

42) It is not surprising that the !Ya Basta! of the Zapatistas has been strongly echoed by the "sans papiers", the movement of illegal immigrants in France.

43) The Zapatistas use truth and dignity as basically interchangeable concepts. The Zapatistas speak of what they say as the 'word of those who are armed with truth and fire' ('la palabra de los armados de verdad y fuego'). The fire is there, but the truth comes first, not just as a moral attribute, but as a weapon: they are armed with truth, and this is a more important weapon than the firepower of their guns. Although they are organised as an army, they aim to win by truth, not by fire. Their truth is not just that they speak the truth about their situation or about the country, but that they are true to themselves, that they speak the truth of truth denied.

44) Communique of 17 March 1995: La Jornada, 22 March 1995.

45) The separation of personal and political, of private and public, is at the same time their mutual constitution. The point is not to conflate the personal and the political, the public and the private, but to abolish them (to abolish the separation which constitutes both). On this, see Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975). To that extent, the phrase 'the personal is political' is misleading.

46) See the chapter by Margara Millan in this volume.

47) It is as a form of the capital relation that the state defines and classifies. The defining action of the state is one moment of the definition inherent in the alienation of labour, the containment of human creativity. For a development of the general argument, see John Holloway, 'Global Capital and the National State' in W. Bonefeld, J. Holloway (eds), Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 116-140.

48) Communique of May 1996, La Jornada 10 June 1996.

49) Communique of May 1996, La Jornada 10 June 1996.

50) At the time of writing (February 1997), the agreement still has not been implemented by the government.

51) La Jornada 17 May 1995.

52) La Jornada, 18 May 1995.

53) La Jornada, 10 June1995.

54) La Jornada, 5 March 1995.

55) 'The cistern contains; the fountain overflows': William Blake, 'The Proverbs of Heaven and Hell': in, for example, William Blake (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958) p. 97.

56) 'A political force whose members do not hold or aspire to hold popularly elected offices nor governmental posts at any level. A political force which does not aspire to take power. A force which is not a political party'. La Jornada, 2 January 1996.

57) First Declaration of La Realidad, January 1996: La Jornada, 30 January 1996.

58) They have often mentioned the idea of plebiscites or referendums as a necessary part of a new political system. It is clear, however, from the experience of other states that plebiscites and referendums are quite inadequate as a form of articulating popular decision-making, and are in no sense comparable to the communal discussions which are central to the Zapatistas' own practice.

59) 'And we demand that the authorities should be able to be removed just as soon as the communities decide it and come to an agreement. It could be through a referendum, or some other similar mechanism. And we want to transmit this experience to every level: when the President of the Republic is no use any more he should be automatically removed. As simple as that.' Press Conference given by Subcomandante Marcos, 26 February 1994: EZLN, La Palabra, Vol.1, p. 244.

60) If indeed they are part of the FLN, as the state maintains, it has remained remarkably ineffective.

61) Radio UNAM interview with Marcos, 18 March 1994, EZLN, La Palabra, Vol. II, p. 97.

62) Closing speech by Marcos to the Intercontinental Meeting in La Realidad: Chiapas, no. 3, pp. 106-116, at p. 107.

63) See the chapter by Heau-Lambert and Rajchenberg in this volume.

64) The question of what sort of organisation should develop out of the Intercontinental Meeting of the summer of 1996 was addressed by Marcos in his closing speech: 'What follows? A new number in the useless enumeration of numerous internationals? A new scheme that will give tranquility and relief to those anguished by the lack of recipes? A world programme for world revolution? A theorisation of utopia which will allow us to maintain a prudent distance from the reality that torments us? An organigram that will secure us all a post, a responsibility, a name and no work? What follows is the echo, the reflected image of the possible and the forgotten: the possibility and necessity of talking and listening... The echo of this rebel voice transforming itself and renewing itself in other voices. An echo that converts itself into many voices, into a network of voices that, in the face of the deafness of Power, chooses to speak to itself, knowing itself to be one and many, knowing itself to be equal in its aspiration to listen and make itself heard, recognising itself to be different in the tonalities and levels of the voices which form it... A network that covers the five continents and helps to resist the death promised to us by Power. There follows a great bag of voices, sounds that seek their place fitting with others... There follows the reproduction of resistances, the I do not conform, the I rebel. There follows the world with many worlds which the world needs. There follows humanity recognising itself to be plural, different, inclusive, tolerant of itself, with hope. There follows the human and rebel voice consulted in the five continents to make itself a network of voices and resistances.' (Closing speech by Marcos to the Intercontinental Meeting in La Realidad: Chiapas, no. 3, pp. 106-116, at p. 112.)

65) See the chapter by Margara Millan in this volume.

66) Obvious precedents are, for example, Marx's discussion of the Paris Commune in the Civil War in France, or Pannekoek's discussion of workers' councils in the early years of this century.

67) La Jornada, 27/8/95.

68) 'Civil society, those people without party who do not aspire to be in a political party in the senes that they do not aspire to be the government, what they want is that the government should keep its word, should do its work': Marcos interview with Cristian Calonico Lucio, 11 November 1995, ms. p39.

69) On the dialectic of constituting and constituted, see the article by Werner Bonefeld, 'Capital as Subject and the Existence of Labour', in W. Bonefeld. R. Gunn, J. Holloway and K. Psychopedis (eds), Open Marxism Vol. III (London: Pluto 1995), pp. 182-212; see also J. Holloway, 'The State and Everyday Struggle', in S. Clarke (ed), The State Debate (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991).

70) The understanding of the working class as a defined group has been extended ad infinitum to discussions about the class definition of those who do not fall inside this group - as new petty bourgeoisis, salariat, etc.

71) What Marx calls primitive accumulation is thus a permanent and central feature of capitalism, not a historical phase. On this, see Werner Bonefeld, 'Class Struggle and the Permanence of Primitive Accumulation', Common Sense no. 6 (1988).

72) For a development of this point, see Richard Gunn's article, 'Notes on Class', Common Sense, no. 2 (1987); and also Werner Bonefeld, 'Capital, Labour and Primitive Accumulation: Notes on Class and Constitution', unpublished ms. (1997).

73) Thus, for Marx, capitalists are the personification of capital, as he repeatedly points out in Capital. The proletariat too first makes its appearance in his work not as a definable group but as the pole of an antagonistic relation: 'a class ... which ... is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete rewinning of man': K. Marx, 'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction', in Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (London:Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), p. 186.

74) The autonomist concept of self-valorisation is perhaps the closest that the Marxist tradition comes to a concept that expresses positively the struggle against-and-beyond capital, but the term is clumsy and obscure. On self-valorisation, see, for example Harry Cleaver, 'The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory: From Valorisation to Self-Valorisation', in W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn and K. Psychopedis (eds), Open Marxism, Volume II (London: Pluto Press, 1992), pp. 106-145.

75) Antonio Garcia de Leon in his prologue to an edition of the Zapatista communiques: EZLN, Documentos y Comunicados: 1 de enero / 8 de agosto de 1994 (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1994), p. 14.

76) The deus ex machina idea stretches far beyond Leninism, of course. It can be seen also in those theories which privilege the revolutionary role of the intellectuals. On a quite different plane, the same notions are reflected in the state's understanding of the Zapatista movement and its (racist) assumption that the real protagonists of the movement are urban white or mestizo intellectuals, such as Marcos.

77) 'Alienation could not even be seen, and condemned of robbing people of their freedom and depriving the world of its soul, if there did not exist some measure of its opposite, of that possible coming-to-oneself, being-with-oneself, against which alienation can be measured': Ernst Bloch, Tuebinger Einleitung in die Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963), Vol. II, p.113. Dignity, in other words.

78) Le Bot, El Sueno, p. 191.

79) Radio UNAM interview with Marcos, 18 March 1994, EZLN, La Palabra, Vol. II, p. 89.

80) Radio UNAM interview with Marcos, 18 March 1994, EZLN, La Palabra, Vol. II, p. 89.

81) Marcos interview with Cristian Calonico Lucio, 11 November 1995, ms. p. 61. This would of course mean a society without power relations.

82) La Jornada, 25 August 1996.

83) This is clumsy, but the best translation I could find for the more elegant 'Detras de nosotros estamos ustedes'.

84) 'Discurso inaugural de la mayor Ana Maria', Chiapas no. 3, pp. 101-105, at p. 103.

Lavori in corso

Riccardo Bellofiore

From Common Sense #22 1997

Editorial Introduction
Ricccardo Bellofiore's article supplies a critical assessment of Appuntamenti di fine secolo [Meeting at the end of the century], edited Pietro Ingrao and Rossana Rossanda, with essays by Marco Revelli, Isidoro Davide Morteilaro and K.S. Karol. 284pp. An expanded version of the book has appeared in German (VSA, Hamburg, 1996). An English language version is not available. Despite this Bellofiore's critique will be understandable. The main arguments of the book are summarised at the beginning of his review. Furthermore, the book's main focus is familiar: Fordism, its crisis,Post-Fordism, globalisation and the New Times of left social and political practice These themes have, time and time again, been advanced within the British context, by the reformist Left, especially those associated with the former Marxism Today. In this context we refer to R. Gunn's review 'Communist Party: Facing up to the Future' (published in CS no.6) and F. Gambino's 'A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation Approach' (published in CS no.19), as sources for further critical reading of mainstream Left proposals.

Bellofiore's article is based on a talk at the Associazione dei Lavoratori e delle Lavoratrici Torinesi (ALLT) in Turin on 24 November 1995. The article retains the original conversational style. We have also retained the Italian title: Lavori in corso means 'work in progress' but might also be translated as 'road work in progress'. We have cut the section where the author speaks about specific Italian conditions associated with the academic growth industry on the Third Italy. Those interested in this issue are advised to consult the German-language version, published in Wildcat Zirkular no.27, July-August 1996. As far as we are aware, an Italian version has not been published

Translation: Werner Bonefeld and Ed Emery

1. Introduction
In a book published In the early 1980s I came across a cartoon. It showed a man meeting Karl Marx on a cloud in heaven. The man says to Marx 'I've read your book.' Marx replies: 'Oh really? And how does it end?'

Now we are in the 1990s and all sorts of people seem to think they have the answer to the question how the history of Marxism, and of communism - the history of that political thought and political practice which had raised the banner of the emancipation of labour has ended. The book by Ingrao and Rossanda moves into the opposite direction: it stubbornly insists that an analysis of, and a judgement on, capitalism has to advance also by inquiring into the contradictory dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. In short it places the question of labour once again at the heart of things. The book needs to be taken seriously and this means, of course, examining its theses in a thorough manner. Apart from the circle close to Ingrao and Rossanda - those who are either present as contributors, or who took part in the debate in il Manifesto after the book's publication, and who, so to speak, are part of the family (for example, Lunghini, Mazzetti, Ravaioli) - a thorough appreciation of their work has, as far as I am aware, not taken place. Most other comments on the book indicated an unwillingness to discuss: they were characterised by disgust, foreclosure, prejudice, and rejection. Commentators who dogmatically refuse to listen have nothing to say.

In what follows I shall try to express a dissenting viewpoint. However, first I would premiss both a note of caution and my own position. The note of caution is the recognition that it is a risky matter and far from easy to attempt to synthesise and argue with Ingrao and Rossanda. This is because of the richness and complexity of the volume, as evidenced in its very structure. The theses of the introductory essay, written by both of them, are already intricate and complex, and this appears further in the collection of letters between Rossanda and Ingrao which make up the second part of the book. These letters are full of disagreements and unanswered questions. Furthermore, their theses enter into fertile exchange with the essays by other authors contained in the third section.I am thus conscious that my critique of Appuntamenti di fine secolo is subject to the inevitable riposte of having over-judged a theoretical development which is very much still under construction. However, if you want to start a discussion, you have to begin somewhere.

So I shall try to extract the main bones of Ingrao and Rossanda's position, to see whether and to what extent their arguments hold up. Let me now turn to my second premiss, that is my own position. The focal point of the book is the question of communism. The two authors declare at the end of their introductory essay that they still have this word in their vocabularies. It was undoubtedly this brave and rather unfashionable statement which gave rise to the whirlwind of criticism that promptly descended on them in the mainstream press. The considerations that follow, and these will not be indulgent, start from the same 'question' as that posed by the authors: communism. To cite Rossana Rossanda (p. 128) 'the challenge as to how to liberate everybody, and not to allow one person to be a slave either of another person or of needs that are so primary that he can't even question himself on the meaning of his existence here on earth. How to regulate power, how to guarantee one's freedom without canceling out that of others, how not to reduce the other to a slave or a commodity or a mere function of himself.' With the same frankness, however, I must state that, at least if for none other than generational reasons, my evaluation of communism as an answer', as it constituted itself in the form of the state during the twentieth century, is far less positive than the by no means sympathetic evaluation offered by Ingrao and Rossanda.

2. Appuntamenti di fine secolo
So let us turn to the main arguments contained in Appuntamenti... which I shall put together with the - albeit in some respects dissonant - theses advanced in the essay by Marco Revelli ('Economy and Social Model in the Transition from Fordism to Toyotism'). The book's argument can be summarised under four main headings:

i) During the 1970s the Taylorist-Fordist-Keynesian model went into crisis. This model was based on the scientific organisation of labour, on the rigid technology of the assembly line,and on an interventionist state which 'mediated' social concerns. This mediation involved support to business through demand management, the guarantee to workers of high levels of employment and of a welfare state. Ingrao and Rossanda don't say much about the origins of this crisis. For Revelli, the crisis was caused by a decline in the rate of economic growth and thus economic instability. The 'Fordist' mass consumer durable goods markets had become saturated and, as he seems to suggest, powerful ecological considerations had emerged. The crisis appears to have come from the outside and appears somehow 'natural'.

ii) The subsequent phase is defined principally via the category of globalisation, the globalisation of capital. The search for flexibility, and thereby for lower costs through a reduction of the minimum size of enterprises, unleashes a global and highly aggressive competitive struggle among individual capitals, hunting for markets wherever they can find them and relocating different parts of their production processes at the global level. Globalisafion thus gives rise to a crisis of the national state, which is definitive for Revelli, and certainly serious for Ingrao and Rossanda. Aided by the liberalisation of the movements of capital, there is a growing importance of the financial component in the profits of big business. In addition to a 'renewed domination' of the North over the South (the Gulf War), there can also be detected an 'ordering omnipotence' of the organs of world government (G7, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Maastricht Treaty).

iii) Concerning the issue of work, globalisation and the crisis of Fordism translate, on the one hand, into precarious work and exclusion and, on the other, into 'mass technological unemployment'. Work becomes increasingly less guaranteed, less stable, and lower paid, while anyone expelled from the labour market finds it harder to get back in. The number of workers in the industrial sector of the developed West declines, and those made redundant are left with no means to fmd work elsewhere. This liberation from work means that, within the capitalist universe, there is a reduction of living labour in real quantitative terms. In the new post-Fordist phase, capital has less need for the waged worker: what we see is the 'tendential end of the relationship of commensurate growth between the production of goods and employment (p.71), as lngrao and Rossanda maintain; and a 'systematic destruction of employment (p 198), according to Revelli.

iv) The present phase of capital in the post-Fordist era is characterised, apart from the aspects outlined above, by the much stronger integration of the workforce into the relations or production. This fourth point, as the first, is more pronounced in Revelli's contribution than in those by Ingrao and Rossanda. On the basis of an analysis restricted mainly to the automobile sector, Revelli seems to deduce an almost complete alienation of the workers (employed in this sector in ever fewer numbers), and an expulsion of conflict from factories which have by now become pacified because the soul' of the workers has been conquered. This, at least, is what we gather from pp. 185-94, although this is contradicted - and, in my view, rightly so - on pp 195-6.

This understanding of capitalist development is widespread amongst the majority of the radical left in Italy and has become more or less its vulgate. We have only to recall the analyses, each with their own peculiarities, of those who wrote contributions for Il Manifesto on the Ingrao-Rossanda volume. From this understanding derive, obviously, suggestions for political action. If it is true that within capitalism the socially necessary labour expended is tending ineluctably to diminish, the question of 'what is to be done' becomes reduced to a handful of options. The notion of a citizen's income, proposed specifically by authors such as Gorz and Aznar, finds little favour with Ingrao and Rossanda. There is also Lunghini's proposal to expand the area of 'concrete' socially useful labour, decommodifying the sphere of social reproduction in order to compensate for the reduction of 'abstract' capitalist work Furthermore, there is the idea of using the increases of productivity with a view to redistributing the smaller amount of work among everybody, as Mazzetti and Ravaioli (and, before them, Napoleoni) propose. In addition, there is Revelli's proposition - although, to be frank, he is not very clear on this - that 'antagonistic subjectivity itself [like post-Fordist capital] leaps over the relations of commodity exchange and thereby beyond the commodity form of labour, and the contract that sanctions it; and that it thus goes beyond the alienated relations of wage labour' (p. 193).

3. On a Fordism that never was
The framework outlined above obviously grasps some real aspects of capitalist development. However it seems to me that it is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of contemporary developments and that it supplies a view that is so one-sided that the implied periodisation of capitalism is quite wrong This is because it rests on distorted data.

Let's begin with the crisis of the Taylorist-Fordist-Keynesian model. I have to say that, to begin with, I regard this putting together of terms as highly problematical. Taylorism, that is the increase in the intensity of labour at a given level of technology, when it was introduced into the United States in the early part of this century, failed because of the conflict which, understandably, it aroused among the craft workers. A different fate was suffered by Fordism in the strict sense. Fordism sought to increase the productivity of labour through a revolution in the machine system, replacing the craft worker with the mass worker. It was only by virtue of this change that it was able successfully to incorporate the new organisational innovations of the early part of the century, which included, but not exclusively so, Taylorism. However, success at the level of production was confronted with the discovery of the limits of markets - the increase in productivity, combined with a relatively stagnant demand for consumer goods and, because of other factors, a weakened demand for investment, was one of the causes of the Great Depression (a far cry from the claim that Fordism means unlimited markets!). Only the Second World War and, it is suggested, Keynesian state intervention opened the era of the swift growth of income, a growth assisted by a politics of deficit demand management. This was Fordism in its broad sense, a mode of regulation which dominated right through to the early 1970s.

But is this really how it was? One might legitimately dispute it. When we look at the data and the most convincing interpretations, we find that the golden era of capitalism after the Second World War was characterised from the early 1960s onwards by the following elements: A world economy that had been unified under the leadership of the United States because Europe and Japan needed a leader country, not merely for economy reasons particularly reconstruction - but, also, for political-military reasons. For this reason we also had a single currency, the dollar (one should say that if there ever was a global capitalism, it was perhaps this). A stable demand for private investment was sustained by high profits and, of course, on rosy expectations because there were certain convictions associated with the proclamation of Keynesian principles, and there were central banks who were ready to function as lenders of last resort (thus not a model of development based on consumption, as suggested by the agreeable conception of Fordism-Keynesianism). Nevertheless, state budgets were essentially balanced; the growing percentage of expenditure in relation to GNP was compensated by a growth in taxation levied principally at the expense of labour. Were one to conceive of the Keynesian era as if it had been characterised by the pursuance of economic policy within the boundaries of national states and by the accumulation of deficits, one would be left with no more than a caricature. In particular, growth of capitalist income was faster than the growth of real wages, although these increased too thanks to the marked expansion of commodity production.

Why did this model go into crisis? Essentially because it was unstable: during its development it undermined its own foundations. In particularly, its international foundations fragmented: the catching-up of Japan and Germany (with Europe coming up behind) pushed the USA out of its undisputable central position and led, during the 1960s, to a sharpening of inter-imperialist rivalry. Then the monetary foundation was undermined: in the same decade, the global monetary system that was based not only on the dollar but also on the dollar's tie with gold, began to wobble and finally collapsed in 1971. Above all, in those same years, industrial conflict began to grow to the point where it exploded at the end of the decade: after years of 'full employment', why on earth should the workers in manufacturing not have done what economic theory teaches night and day - in other words, exploit a favourable position in the labour market a market that was then favouring the seller? More serious than that, as well as asking for higher wages and less pressure at work - demands that in abstract terms are not incompatible with the capitalist model - at the heart of working class antagonism was the rejection of 'factory discipline' itself, and capitalist command over production as a whole. Mi this had been perfectly foreseeable; in fact, it was foreseen by Kalecki in a well-known article dating from 1944. In the 1970s, budget deficits increased - not only, and not so much, because of the social pressure that was demanding reforms but also because of the attempt by the state to continue a Keynesian response to the difficulties, and to tame and circumvent the problems posed by social conflict in the big factories. In addition to this conflict at the 'heart' of the crisis-ridden development, and also intra-capitalist conflict, there was, for a time, a conflict with the producers of raw materials, of oil in particular. Over a period of a few years, profit expectations worsened with the decline in profitability, the time-horizon of investments contracted, and investments fell. Strange as it may seem, it was the return to the fore of monetarist economic policy - symbolised in the coming to power of Reagan and Thatcher - which led in the United States, but also elsewhere, to an explosion of deficits and public debt, precipitating the more or less ferocious subsequent attempts at reducing them. In regard to Italy, for example, Di Cecco characterised the Italian model in the 1980s as 'delinquent Keynesianism'. Not only in Italy, despite this 'Keynesianism', investment is having a hard time getting under way again.

The reason for all this is not at all mysterious. If what I say is correct, then the crisis of the old model derives not from some rather vaguely defied crisis of growth, but from a far more material emergence of fundamentally internal conflicts over the creation and distribution of wealth. Other precise consequences follow from this. The political right's critique of the Keynesian era is inconsistent: it did not fail as a result of a spendthrift and unproductive state (which, as I have said, is doubtful that it ever existed). The Keynesianism of those days had little to do with the Keynesianism that is peddled by academic circles and the media.

The crisis of the so-called Fordist model was crucially due to social conflict, and so its transcendence, which is still under way, inevitably has to pass through a radical redefinition of existing conditions in the labour market and the labour processes. The fact that investment is not lifting off after two decades of defeats of the working class is perhaps testimony to the radicality of the challenge to capitalist power which was more or less consciously pursued, and of the fear that followed from it that every upturn in the economy would reactivate conflict. A testimony, in short, that the dismantling and restructuring of all parts of the capitalist valorisation process is still in full motion. And one can again ask: if things are as I have said, does it make sense to compare, as the authors of the volume do, tPost-Fordism' with a -however defined - conception of 'Fordism', a conception which appears increasingly as a parenthesis in the history of capitalism? Is it really impossible, if not rather simply improbable, to repropose a Fordist/Keynesian settlement, a settlement that combines a sort of global regulation with income and employment policies based on a negotiated settlement of a new Toyotist organsiation of labour? In this respect, we might have to set aside the desirability of such a settlement from a Left point of view, to which I would give a negative response. That this reproposition is, as I suggest, improbable derives from the fact that there has not yet appeared on the horizon an 'objective' crisis such as that which struck Fordism narrowly defined at the end of the 1920s. This is because, in our time, there is hardly a 'subjective' critique of the contradictory constitution of Fost-Fordism which does not propose a hasty 'exit' from it. Such a critique is entirely powerless to confront Post- Fordism's real contradictions.

4. Uneven Globalisation
The thesis of the globalisation of capital also deserves to be reexamined. We have seen that, in some respects, the capitalism of the Keynesian era was more, not less, global. We could add that the capitalism of the golden age of the gold standard, that is the period which ran from the last quarter of the nineteenth century through to the First World War, was also at a high level of globalisation. The present growth of trade integration merely carries through to completion the recouping, begun after the Second World War, of the terrain lost in the years of mercantilism between the two wars. It is certainly true, on the other hand, that the contemporary greater dependence on export markets is a consequence of the lesser weight of internal investments. It is also true that, as regards manufacturing and most particularly traditional manufacturing of mass consumer durable goods, the quota of imported goods has effectively increased.

On the whole, then, industrial competition has indeed increased dramatically, and the globalisation of production in this area of the economy is a fact. However, the phenomenon of global competition in manufacturing goes hand-in-hand, as the economists should know, with the reduced importance of this sector for the creation of income and employment. This reduction is compensated by the growth of sectors that are protected from imports. This development which strikes at all the classic locations of the organised strength of the labour movement, is not generalisable to all sectors of production. And the sociologists, for their part, should know that the post-Fordist reorganisation of labour, to which I will turn below, cuts right across both protected and non-protected sectors.

The globalisation of commercial flows is, however, another of those sirens which we should not allow to bewitch us. If anything, in the crisis of Fordism in its broader sense, the tendency towards the regionalisation of capitalism into the three areas of America, Europe and Asia seems to predominate. Ingrao and Roassanda note this, but they do so as if this phenomenon operates merely as something that puts a limit to the predominant tendency towards globalisation. In fact, and importantly, the notable characteristic of these three areas is that they are 'closed' economies, in the sense that their openness to trade does not seem to have grown in any dramatic sense. This is true, in particular, for Western Europe as a whole - not, of course, for single countries given the process of trade unification within Europe itself. It is thus understandable that the thesis of the globalisation of capital appears, for example, plausible from the Italian viewpoint - that is of an economy which was relatively more closed than others, more dependent than others on a traditional manufacturing sector which was hit particularly hard by openings to the outside.

It is equally wrong to argue, as Ingrao-Rossanda and Revelli do, that we should see the globalisation of production, and the present reality of the global character of commodity production, as something definitively new and imposed by neoliberalism, as part and parcel of the tendency of capital to seek lower wage costs, less regulated conditions of labour, and countries that are more compliant with the desires of companies. Those who take at face value the thesis of a single path of capital after the Fordist-Keynesian era, lose sight of the plurality of capitalist models in the 1970s and 1980s, and the disunited nature of capital today. Alongside the Anglo-American model of breakneck deregulation - a deregulation, however, that is never carried to its extreme logical consequences - we have had another model taking shape in Germany, Japan and South-East Asia.

In some cases, the German case in particular, this model has been compatible with high wages and relatively restricted working hours.

Even South Korea, we should remember, has seen - albeit from a starting point of a particularly low level - rates of growth in real wages never seen before in the history of capitalism. This model was based, as in Japan, on the protection of the highly qualified sections of the work-force, at the expense of its more peripheral sections. At the heart of this model there was a state and a banking system which regularly broke every neo-classical wisdom, every suggestion of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. This has meant practicing the kind of support policies for national industry which are heresy for neo-liberalism: a concern for the quality of local factors of production, and not only their cost, selecting credit flows, and controlling its own capital and its domestic labour. It has been this type of capitalism, which we might call Schumpeterian, that up until now has obtained the best results, and not the sort of capitalism propagandised by the supporters of deregulation. The countries of Latin America have learned that lesson, and the countries of South East Asia are also learning it fast. Both these groups of countries have enjoyed, more than enough, the guidance by proponents of neo-liberal anti-statism. Clinton himself came to power with a programme which proposed intervention in the quality of local factors of production, and not with a programme that argued the case for a subordination to the ideology of globalisation. And the variously-labelled experiences of the 'Third Italy', of the 'Adriatic backbone', of the North-East of Italy, have they not perhaps also been constructed on this basis, namely on a combination of flexibility and qualification of labour? But when reading the Appuntamenti, we often have the impression that the ideology propagated by international organisations is confused with understanding of the real developments.

As with the questioning of the Taylorist/Fordist/Keynesian model, the questioning of the thesis of globalisation has enormous political consequences. Just to mention two: the Gulf War would appear at least as much, if not more, marked by the conflict within northern capitalism as by conflict between North and South; and the same should be said of what is happening in Eastern Europe after the collapse of real socialism. However, let me stay with the thesis of globalisation, in order to sum up. I have left to one side one characteristic, the most striking, of global capitalism, and that is the exponential growth and autonomisation of speculative capital in financial markets. This is something which one would have to be blind not to see. However it is hard to understand why this should be seen by the whole of the Left, even the less conformist groups among them, almost as a natural given fact, rather than as a product of choice, or at least of the omission of possible actions. We shall never find out whether 'global' financial capital really is uncontrollable unless we try to control it - and the subjects of this control, given what I have just said about 'regional' capitalism, inevitably have to be found at an intermediary level between the national level and the (for good or ill) Utopian level of a world government. To state just one: honestly reformist proposals which strike at the speculative movements and not the productive movements of capital have been on the table for a while. The new information technologies, whatever one might wish to say about them, increase rather than reduce the possibility of control over monetary flows. Events like those following on from the crisis of the 'irrevocably' fixed exchange rates of the European Monetary System confirm that the much-vaunted death of the autonomy of national monetary policies has been announced prematurely. In short, it is possible to act.

5. Too much work
The so-called globalisation of capital is thus a phenomenon which is far from new. What we have been seeing in recent years is rather a redefinition on the part of capital of the national and international conditions of accumulation, which has not yet run its full course, and which is best understood through the categories of regionalisation and plurality, a plurality of capitalisms, Because Ingrao and Rossanda analyse the general tendencies of capitalism differently from me, their analysis of mass unemployment, which they share with many other well regarded commentators, is also quite different from mine. I have to confess that my perplexity with their analysis of this issue is even more marked.

The clearest and most rigorous exposition of the thesis that capitalism has transformed from that of Fordist-Keynesian full-employment into a post-Fordist 'future without work' ('too many commodities, very little work') is probably that of Giorio Lunghini in L'Eta dello Spreco ('The Age of Waste'). The structural change of recent years is said to consist in the fact that the increase in unemployment in periods of recession is crystallised by technological and organisational restructurings, so that when the economy revives employment does not rise. The quantity of living labour employed by capital is thus, it is claimed, tendentially destined to fall. In this circumstance too, however, a close look at what is happening in different areas of capitalism reveals a quite different picture.

First of all, right until the end of the 1980s, aggregate employment continued to grow everywhere, and it is too early to know whether the dip, which has been seen subsequently in some economies, is permanent or temporary. In any case, the employment figure as a percentage of the workforce has remained stable for decades. Secondly, the tendency to reduce living labour affects manufacturing, and in particular the large factories. However, in the terms in which this process has really taken place, it had already taken place in the USA during the 'Fordist' phase itself. This does not seem particularly unnatural since otherwise the capitalist reproduction would remain stuck in a specific commodity-configuration. Thirdly, within this sector, it is not clear to me why there is never any reference to the capitalism of the newly industrialised countries - those of South East Asia, for example. It is in these countries that we see a continued input of new labour power into the processes of valorisation and powerful waves of urban migration. The omission is all the more serious because it is in Asia that the accumulation of 'global' capital is, again, resuming most vigorously.

One of the more striking weaknesses of the analysis of imperialism up until the 1960s was the forecast that it was impossible for those countries which were then called the Third World, to take an active part in capitalist development. It is this Third World which today is pushing the diverging thrusts of inclusion and exclusion which have their cause precisely in the lift-off of capitalism. Finally, it is as well to bear in mind that unemployment presents peculiar characteristics in the different capitalist regions, with notable variations also in their midst: with all the necessary caution regarding the reliability of statistics, it is obvious that the unemployment levels of little more than 2% in Japanese statistics, and the oscillation of United States statistics at around 6% (euphemistically called 'full employment'), indicate a far different situation from rates of European unemployment, which range from 10% in Germany to 25% in Spain, with Italy somewhere in between. If the statistics on unemployment are sometimes underestimated and this is certainly the case in Italy - it is also true that the main body of precarious and unstable employment is invisible. We thus have to offer differentiated explanations of the different experiences. In the United States, the relatively more important factors are the deregulation of the labour market and the growing imbalance in the distribution of wealth. This has made possible the creation of insecure, low-skilled employment that, more often than not, maintains these workers in poverty. At the same time, the central position of the USA in the international division of labour permits also the creation of skilled and highly paid employment. In the European case, a greater role is played by the lesser downward flexibility of real wages. Thus the circumstance that restructuring penalised unskilled labour and led to an uneven position of Europe in the international hierarchy. So, although labour-time is declining in the area of unskilled or simple work employment of the traditional sectors of the older industrial-capitalism, there is good reason to maintain that the capitalised total labour time is increasing hugely.

The true structural break of the last fifteen years has been the interruption of the more than century-long tendency towards the reduction of individual labour-time. Instead of this, there has been the lengthening and intensification of the effective working day. To this has contributed, to greater or lesser extent in the various countries, the fragmentation of the labour market to which I referred earlier. This has led to the re-emergence of the 'working-poor' and precariousness of employment. In addition, there has been the 'slimming-down' of big companies and the externalisation of parts of the production process, to which Ingrao and Rossanda, as well as Revelli, draw attention. This externalisation weakens the central and strongest swathe of guaranteed employment and offloads the pressure of competitiveness onto subcontractors where the weaker regulation of the conditions of labour can be exploited more easily. As Sergio Bologna has reminded us untiringly for years, this externalisation is in large part responsible for the expansion of self-employed labour, a labour which in reality has nothing to do with 'self-employment' but which is rather labour that is commanded by, more often than not, a single contractor. The 'strong' area of the labour market is reduced while the 'weak' area is expanded. From this point of view it seems reasonable to state that the characteristic of our epoch is that of 'too much work', and not of 'too little work'.

If the first reason has to do with the conditions of the labour market, the second reason relates to the characteristics of the capitalist reorganisation of production. In the central areas of accumulation a crucially important role is played by the production of commodities which are rich in terms of information and which require a labour-force that is able to exploit knowledge and experiences accumulated over a long time. In Marxian terms, the labour time incorporated in these commodities is a multiple of that contained in the products of simple labour. In the meantime, the less-skilled labour involved in the traditional production of mass consumer durables has been relocated to areas that were once peripheral. These two phenomena explain the circumstance that, in Europe, there is a simultaneous growth of total labour time and non-labour time, permitting the continued existence of long-term structural unemployment - a development that should not surprise a Left which argues on the basis of Marx. There should, however, be no surprise that such a radical redefinition of the concrete nature of the valorisation process at a global level demands a higher mobility of the transfer of surplus value: it is inherent in 'capital' that it seeks to push its mobility forward with as little control by the state as possible.

There is also a third reason for the lengthening and intensification of the working day, a reason so obvious that I would not even raise it were it not for the fact that nobody seems to pay attention to it. The transition from the high growth of the Fordist/Keynesian model to the reduced growth of the subsequent years has seen a reduction not only of relative wages, but also of real wages. The reduction of real wages is obviously a powerful factor that increases one's willingness to work much more intensively and for longer hours.

In the face of this reality, Left-wing intellectuals have allowed themselves to be taken in by the ideology that capital is driving inexorably towards a reduction, and in the end to an elimination, of labour. The exhaustion of capital's capacity to create employment of which we hear so much nowadays has led some to rejoice and others to lament The view that capital's capacity to create employment is exhausted amounts to a fairytale. I have to say that if there is a period in the history of capitalism that, for me, confirms the Marxist thesis of the centrality of 'abstract labour' in the organisation of social life, it is precisely this one. Particularly if one takes account of the fact that today the very instruments of information technology which are revolutionising production are also revolutionising consumption; and that the distinction between labour time and non-labour time is rendered increasingly arbitrary.

If this is how things stand, then it is easy to see the limits of the proposals against mass unemployment which we mentioned at the start of this paper. All of them make the same mistake. Namely, they start from the mistaken assumption that in the present phase of capitalist development demand for labour is declining rather than increasing. In other words, the proposals against mass unemployment are not based on a correct appreciation of the facts. Since real wages are falling, the reduction of hours of work at parity wages would lead probably to the extension of de facto hours of work, to double work and to work in the black economy. The promotion of socially useful work would probably translate itself into a dualist segmentation of the labour market which, contrary to the intentions of those who propose it, would involve the devaluing of 'concrete' jobs and reduce these to the role of a simple shock-absorber in relation to the difficulties faced by those employed in the area of commodity production. At the same time, those employed in this area would be left to their fate and this because of the mistaken conviction that we are witnessing the problematic but 'tendentially' assured euthanasia of capital. Nor am i convinced by the schizophrenia of those who portray the post-Fordist labour processes as a place of total alienation and who, for this reason, hope to find and look for the emancipatory potential beyond capital in the sphere of reproduction as well as in [autonomous] spaces. I am not convinced of this, probably I am still too much imbued by the old materialism, because I do not see how this could be rendered possible. These are all proposals which start, like Gorz and a number of French intellectuals, from the assumption that society is divided into two parts, one, the declining part, is seen to be subordinate to capital, and the other, the increasing part, is seen as one of freedom. It is hard to disagree with Bruno Trentin's Il Coraggio dell'Utopia ('The Courage of Utopia') when he says that individuals who accept the mutilation of themselves during a part of the day are marked throughout the whole of their daily activity. There is no reason to assume why this should be different for the whole of society.

If we want to talk again about the reduction of labour time, then we have to do it in the concrete processes of production and in relation to the whole range of life, and we have to debate it in such a way that we secure a reduction of labour time not only, regarding the labour markets, on the side of demand but, also, and importantly, on the side of supply to obtain flexibility and choice. And there should be no doubt that such a demand can only be realised through 'artificial', that is political interventions, interventions that go against the natural tendency and mode of motion of capitalist accumulation. This demand poses not only a quite different dynamic in the distribution of income but, also, an active political intervention at the level of macro-economic industrial policies and labour policies. Therefore, the conflict within capital and within the state cannot be left behind; rather it needs to be taken up. The sooner we abandon the thesis that the capitalist tendency at the end of this century is to reduce labour time, the better.

6. In search of the phoenix: Post-Fordism
In the book by Ingrao and Rossanda there is much talk of postFordism - a word which has been fashionable for some time. It is not at all clear what exactly is meant by this and, unfortunately, the phoenix remains as such even in the essay by lngrao and Bossanda. Fortunately, Revelli's essay is an exception, but it does leave a strange sensation. First because post-Fordism is here defined in opposition to Fordism in the broad sense. While Fordism is seen as being founded on unlimited growth, economies of scale, conflictual factory-relations, and a national state and a domestic capital, postFordism is seen as having limited world markets, a lean and hegemonic factory, a deterritorialisation of the enterprise and the crisis of the national state. I have already expressed doubts on some of these defining elements: here I limit myself to express my doubts whether it makes sense to define post-Fordism simply as a counterpoint to the Keynesian era, without broadening one's gaze to a wider and possibly more meaningful span of time. Were one not do this, might there not be the risk of attributing to post-Fordism elements of pre-Fordism? Ingrao and Rossanda seem to share my doubt (p. 43) and the problem cannot simply be resolved by identifying the one with the other, as Revelli seems to suggest (pp. 792-3).

The most attractive part of Revelli's article, however, is that on the changes in the organisation of work. Unfortunately I cannot here give it the space it deserves. Nevertheless it is quite striking that in order to describe post-Fordism such massive recourse is made to marketing manuals, a resource from which the suspicion of ideology is not far removed. There is also a lack of any reference to the copious literature on the subject, which is often dedicated to the innovations in that selfsame automobile sector on which Revelli focuses his attention: here we have only to recall the contributions by Parker-Slaughter, Jacob, Kern-Schuman, Pollert, Jurgens-Malsch-Dohse, Kennedy-Florida and Appelbaus-Batt. These authors supply a far more contradictory picture than that proposed in this volume. Given the lack of space, I shall content myself with suggesting that a typical characteristic of the present phase is that the unifying element of capitalist strategy is the attempt to bring to an end the process of re-forming the working class. This process which might perhaps combine flexibility, precarious conditions and skilled work, does not cancel out conflict, even though it does render it more difficult (when it comes to it, Taylorism and Fordism themselves were, in their own time, presented as the prelude to the disappearance of conflict), which makes the individual place of work more flexible, while rigidifying the global production line and thereby making it more fragile.

It appears to me that the. whole Left which has over the last thirty years concerned itself with the analysis, and the future, of work, has premised its analysis on the same cardinal error - a mistake which appears also in the recent writings of Bruno Trentin. This mistake consists in the primacy accorded to Taylorism. Let's take the Taylorist-Fordist-Keynesian model with which we began. Current interpretations look at Keynesianism through the eyes of Ford, and at Ford through the lenses of Taylor. In this view, capitalist exploitation of labour exhausts itself in, and is no more than, the 'pressure' brought to bear on labour. From this it follows that post-Fordism would amount to no more than the extension of this pressure from the body to the brain - or even, more spiritualistically, to the 'soul' of the worker.

There is, I believe, a serious historical reason behind this mistaken conception. The cycle of struggles at the end of the 1960s, centred as it was on struggles over the extraction and organisation of labour, followed on from a phase, starting in the mid-1960s, of real and proper Taylorist regression in Italian industry. At that time, domestic producers reacted to the wage conflicts at the beginning of the 1960s by accumulating capital without comitting new investments and thus by intensifring labour on the basis of the given technical composition of capital - yet another example that Taylorist means of extracting surplus value lead inevitably to conflict. However, the widespread interpretation by the Left turned the real sequence of capitalist development, as Marx understood it, onto its head. There is an inherent tendency in capital to effect technological change, to control the extortion of labour through the revolutionising of the system of machinery. The direct and personal control over labour that is typical for the extraction of absolute surplus value, is 'governed' by the indirect and impersonal control that is typical for the extraction of relative surplus value.

Marx posed the hypothesis that revolutions in the organisation of the labour process do not precede the innovation of the labour process but rather follow it; and that it is through the dynamic of competition that individual capitalists are compelled to revolutionise the labour process. The dynamic of competition imposes upon individual capitals the requirement to reorganise work. Were one to start one's analysis from the opposite end, and were one not conscious of the force that impresses itself upon the individual parts of the accumulation process, then one is easily led to confuse the break with Taylorism with the opening of automous spaces for employed labour. Trentin makes this mistake when he conceives of the crisis of Taylorism as bringing about conditions of work that are less and less focused on rigidly performed tasks. Revelli's analysis, although he describes the situation quite differently and arrives at opposite political conclusions, starts on the same basic assumptions. For him, Toyotism amounts to an intensification of Taylorism and thus to a Strengthening of Fordism, As he puts it, there is 'once again a form of focused pressure on one's own labour power, on the management of labour time, on the performance of work' (p.182).

For Revelli, the epochal break resides in the circumstance of a completed reduction of the worker to a thing, to a commodity among other commodities. Again, capital's impossible dream is confused with reality. However, were one to argue with Marx, the question that needs to be posed would be quite different. The question would then not be whether the post-Fordist production method serves to conclude the restructuring of the labour processes and the labour market that has moved into all directions with the complete automatisation within big industry. Rather, and against the background that this has not functioned in real and proper Fordism, one would have to inquire about the points of rupture of this so apparently omnipotent mechanism

6. What is to be done?
Our critical assessment of some of the essays contained in Appuntamenti, will probably be accussed variously as operaism, industrialism and productivism. There is no doubt that my analysis is fundamentally different from that on which the Ingrao-Rossa essay is based. Strangely, though, this difference appears less fundamental if one looks at some of their practical conclusions at the end of their joint essay. There they ask - as I have done above - if it is not premature to abandon 'labour' and the state as areas of social and political action. On this issue, it seems to me, that Ingrao and Rossanda are, thank godness, less coherent than authors such as Gorz, Aznar and Latouche, but also Revelli and Longhini, Mazzetti and Ravaioli who, each in their own way, appear to say that the 'civilisation of labour' as well as the 'statism' of the 'short century' is coming to an end.

I find it easy to share, in particular, the observation of Rossana Rossanda in the letters part of the book. She writes: 'I have never thought that the sum total of a person exhausts himself in his relation of and with production. Outside of that area a whole set of fundamental experiences, beginning with perceptions of life and death, of the other, of one's own sex and that of others, of love, of fear, of growing, of dying, of good and bad, of the sense of one's own being, wounded or matured by experience. Of literature, of history, of memory, of art, of thinking and counting, of play, which to a certain extent cut across the life of every man and woman' (pp 100- 1). Although one might disagree with what Rossanda has to say afterwards, namely when she states that the movement born from Marxism has never been Labourist Marx was certainly not Labourist when he stated in the Holy Family that 'if it wins, the proletariat does not become the absolute side of society; in fact it wins only by transcending itself and its opposite'. However, to me it seems undeniable that not only the Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals, but also that closer to our time, of the old and the new Left, that was present right up until the mid-1970s in workplaces, always based themselves on a belief in the centrality of production - and this even then when working-class struggles were taking place against the primacy of production, and despite this claimed a higher dignity than that accorded to other conflicts For this reason, amongst others, the labour movement has been placed' in the defendant's stand by the so-called 'new movements' foremost amongst them the feminist and the green movements' Here I believe, we find an almost logical misunderstanding upon 'which 'the contemporary difficulties of a Left politics are based For anyone like Ingrao-Rossanda and myself as well, who still believes that' the contemporary 'conditions of social autonomy' is founded on the 'position within the system of production of goods or services and the access to the system of exchange' (p.101), conflict over and within work inevitably has to remain - to use again that expressions which Bossanda does not like - at the centre. However this social centrality of labour within capitalist accumulation, which is in turn at the heart of this society, can not be translated into a political centrality of labour in the sense of establishing a hierarchy between the different subjects, which would accord more weight to the working class. Or, again in the sense of defining the characteristics of the future society, according to Hanna Arendt's reproach against Marx: communism as a society of workers without wage labour. The challenge to create an anti-capitalist movement in which different subjects pay attention to each other and recognise each other's equal dignity, is in fact still not solved. Rossanda herself recognises this when she says that 'within the new subjects there is a temptation to substitute one totalising view with another' (p. 126). This misunderstanding is almost logical because the different 'communes' that have been created through the struggle against capital - that force which 'dissolves into thin air all that is stable' - tend to regard themselves as permanent Perhaps this 'subjective' difficulty is the most material of all, and its overcoming the key to an authentic theory and practice of 'transition' which will truly examine the questions raised by the Greens and, in particular, the women's movement.

The dichotomy between Ingrao and Rossanda's analysis and their practical recommendations has a high price: their insistence on the centrality of labour, deprived of any reference to the authentic dynamics of the daily explosiveness of labour, are tinged with idealism (can work still be a value?, p. 71); and their recourse to an alternative sort of statism and an alternative public sphere with which they wish to transform the 'things' from above, has to appear inevitably politicist.

On the other hand, even if my considerations should be vindicated - that is that capitalist accumulation is not moving into the direction of reducing labour, and that interventions into the relations of labour inevitably has to pass through economic policy -there would still obviously remain the dramatic difficulty that this volume addresses: how to organise the restructuring of capital? Whatever the answer, I do not believe that it will be helped by analyses that are incorrect and replies that are consequently illusory. Perhaps one of my friends was right when he said that Marxists have hitherto changed the world: now it is time to go back to interpreting it.