Something tremendously exciting seems to be happening these days. After a long, bleak period when capitalism has been on the offensive and most people on the defensive, there are signs that the tide is turning. Not only have a whole series of huge struggles surged up reversing the pole of class initiative, but those battles have taken imaginative new forms and have been increasingly linking up to complement and reinforce each other. These developments allow us to at least raise the hypothesis that we are in the midst of a fundamental shift in the balance of social power.
The Korean general strike in the Winter of 1996-1997 was an important moment of this turning. That great struggle --which renewed and amplified those of a decade earlier-- sent shock waves rippling through not only East Asia but business-labor conflicts around the world. With their challenge to one of the most important "Asian Tigers" of world capitalism, Korean workers of all sorts reinforced a swelling wave of revolts against the repressive core of the global state policies that have been imposed on the world over the last twenty years. The Korean general strike --the first Korean struggle whose real character was conveyed honestly to the rest of the world via the Internet-- thrilled and gave strength to those of us in battle elsewhere.
Like the French strikes which preceded those in Korea, the object of revolt was a package of increasingly repressive anti-worker policies aimed at reducing workers' real wages and their ability to organize and struggle. Those policies against the waged working class were part of a more general effort to continue to shift income, wealth and power from people in general to capital in all its forms.
In Europe, the Maastricht Treaty embodies and symbolizes this complex set of policies. The movement toward the unification of Europe has been turned into a terrain of fierce confrontation and struggle by those whom it was designed to control.
In the United States systematic attacks on wages, unions, students, immigrants, women and social welfare programs by both Republican and Democratic administrations have implemented this general trend in the heartland of Pax Americana. Here too a diverse array of resistance efforts show some signs of beginning to gel into a new movement that challenges not only American policies but the whole system of global capitalism.
In the South, since the early 1980s the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have imposed parallel policies through their structural adjustment programs. Resistance to those programs has now progressed from spontaneous explosions to national and international grassroots movements challenging the system as a whole.
But the hypothesis of a turning tide is based on more than the sum of its parts. This is because those parts are linking up and complementing each other in new ways, ways that are building the power of both each part and of the whole. Through linkages the struggles circulate and because many of them involve imaginative new approaches to politics, organizing methods and visions of the future there is a circulation of imagination and innovation as well as of energy and dedication.
Some of this circulation can be seen within particular sectors, such as that of waged labor. The solidarity of workers elsewhere in the world with the struggles of Korean workers was one such expression. The collaboration of workers throughout Europe to defeat Maastricht policies aimed at them all has been another. More developed, perhaps, has been the internationalization of the struggle of the Mersey Dock workers in Liverpool, England which has reached beyond other workers in that country to mobilize direct actions in a kind of global general strike against shipping companies using the Mersey Docks or against ports servicing ships headed to or from those docks.
Some of this circulation of struggle, imagination and innovation has occurred more broadly through many sectors of society whose activists have been able to see and organize around the interconnections among their efforts. Examples are the mobilizations against unemployment , social welfare cuts and anti-immigrant policies in Europe where all kinds of people, waged and unwaged, local and foreign, have come to understand how attacks against others undercut their own efforts. The results have been massive, broad-based demonstrations and developing organization on a Europe-wide basis.
An important moment in the building of this wave in the Western Hemisphere was the early 1990s continent-wide resistance to the creation and implementation of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. When American policy makers followed up a trade agreement between the US and Canada by reaching out to include Mexico, resistance blossomed in all three countries. In each country literally hundreds of groups of all sorts (labor, women, indigenous, greens, etc.) coalesced to form national networks which then linked to form a North America-wide continental network of resistance. Although the efforts failed to stop the implementation of NAFTA it set in motion an historic new level of self mobilization and struggle from the frozen Arctic to the steaming jungles of Southern Mexico.
Taking their name from the indigenous hero of the early 20th Century Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata, the Zapatistas have made the usual peasant demands for land, food, education, health services and respect, but they have also articulated and called for a massive grassroots mobilization, outside the formal political system, outside the formal union structures of "labor". A little bit like the 1987 movement in Korea, against an authoritarian one-party police state which had been imposing vicious austerity and repression, the Zapatistas called for a rethinking and imagining of ways real democracy might be implemented in Mexico. To the shock of traditional revolutionaries they also announced, up front, that they were not out to "seize power" but rather to create a political space in which the Mexican people, both indigenous and mestizo, could undertake the re-invention of self-governance. They demanded not regional autonomy for the indigenous Mayans (a la ex-Yugoslavia) but cultural and political autonomy for communities everywhere in Mexico --which has an incredibly diverse array of linguistic and cultural traditions.
The repressive reaction of the Mexican government to this revolution --the sending of 15,000 troops in early 1994 and 50,000 more in early 1995-- provoked an outpouring of sympathy and solidarity for the Zapatistas in Mexico, where hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to stop the military offensives. It also spurred an international mobilization of demonstrations against Mexican government installations around the world and an influx of international observers to subject Mexican government brutality to the harsh light of world public opinion. The results of this mobilization were twofold: first, it twice forced the Mexican government to accept a political rather than military terrain of struggle (on which it has lost consistently) and second, those in sympathy with the Zapatistas in other countries picked up the essence of the new politics emanating from the Mountains of Southeastern Mexico and began to renovate their own thinking and organizing efforts a home. These developments have made "Zapatismo" a world-wide phenomenon. It is not that people are imitating the Zapatistas by trying to copy their "model", but rather that the indigenous struggles have catalyzed a renewal of revolutionary energy and enthusiasm for innovation and imagination.
Just how widespread this phenomenon has become emerged in the Spring of 1996 when the Zapatistas issued a Call for a global discussion about fighting current capitalist policies (which in Latin America are called "neoliberalism") and about creating new opening for humanity beyond capitalism. They suggested, with some temerity, continental gatherings for the Spring and an Intercontinental one for the Summer of that year. The response was dramatic and far exceeded their expectations. Huge meetings were held in the Spring and, to the utter dismay of the Mexican government and its army, over 3,000 grassroots organizers from 43 countries and 5 continents gathered in Chiapas at the end of July for a week of meetings in five different Zapatista communities in the highland forests and lowland jungles.
Before these meetings large international gatherings of activists outside the state had been primarily counterpoints to official state-sponsored meetings, such as the regular TOES that accompanies each Big 7 Summit, the UN Environmental Meetings at Rio de Janeiro or the Women's Meetings in Beijing. This time the action was autonomous and involved a completely unprecedented degree of grassroots collaboration across countries and continents. So successful was the "First Intercontinental Encounter Against Neoliberalism and for Humanity" that the 3,000 participants committed themselves to organizing another, the following year in Europe. That "Second Intercontinental Encounter" took place in Spain in the summer of 1997 and drew some 4,000 participants from all over the world. The time and place for a Third is now being discussed.
The central nervous system of these collaborations has been the Internet. From the very beginning the mobilization of support for the Zapatistas drew on pre-existing Internet networks, such as the anti-NAFTA lists and conferences, to circulate information and share ideas for struggle. The elaboration of new neural networks has continued and now interlink not only those in solidarity with the Zapatistas but a wide variety of movements. As mentioned above, widespread foreign understanding of the Korean general strike was only possible because Korean activists took to the Internet with their message, with background documents and appeals for solidarity. The two Zapatista Intercontinental Encounters were organized overwhelmingly through the Internet and much of the discussion at the Second meeting in Spain was over how to build and elaborate an "intercontinental network of alternative communication" (including the Internet, pirate radio, TV, print media, and even satellites!) to speed the growth of an "intercontinental network of struggle" against the present system.
These events seem to mark an historical turning point, as I said at the outset above. For over twenty years we have seen capitalist power express itself through supranational institutions such as multinational corporations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Union, Maastricht, and NAFTA. We have witnessed and suffered the consequences of the creation of a globally homogenous set of repressive economic and political policies ("Neoliberalism"). During these last two decades most struggles have seemed purely defensive, with few exceptions --such as the 1987 cycle of struggles in Korea. Today, the tide seems to be shifting, not just in terms of the frequency of revolt but in terms of organizational imagination and strength. Old forms of organization are finally being set aside and conversations are multiplying, stimulating new approaches. New experiments that work, such as the Zapatistas, are properly receiving close critical scrutiny and stimulating new ideas. There is an imaginative energy abroad in the world that is bringing hope and excitement to a new generation of militants and revitalizing the thinking of old militants seeking new directions.
As long as capitalism endures the fundamental framework of class struggle will remain more or less the same. But within that framework of exploitation and resistance, of popular creativity and state co-optation, change is recurrent. An international wave of struggle broke the back of the post-WWII Keynesian methods of managing capitalism and the capitalist repression and restructuring which followed succeeded in throwing the working class on the defensive. Now, we seem to be once again taking the initiative into our own hands, and we have both new visions and new tools to build the currents of a new wave of struggle.
The old definition of the "working class" as waged, industrial workers has been a part of the orthodox Marxist tradition that grew out of the first great arena of capitalist industrialization: manufacturing. For many years the dynamics of class struggle has made that definition obsolete and counterproductive. Not only have workers fought with considerable success to limit the portion of their lives dominated directly by waged labor, but as capital responded by colonizing their new activities in the time set free (e.g., education, recreation) it has sought to covert those new activities into work for itself, either directly productive labor that contributes to commodity production (e.g., research, peasant production exploited through the market) or indirectly productive labor that produces labor power (e.g., housework, school work, recreation as re-creation of labor power), the most fundamental commodity of all. As a result the class struggle today can only be grasped in terms of a multiplicity of fierce conflicts that permeate every sector and sphere of society. Students who struggle to refuse their own conversion into labor power, housewives who combat patriarchy and strive to rear their children as fighters rather than conformists and peasants who seek autonomy from markets for either their produce or their labor power, are all fighting members of the working class. Capital understands this extremely well and has invented strategies and institutions to undercut or co-opt their efforts. We must understand it as well in order to build alliances that cross sectors and overcome the divisions which have weakened us.
Given this new, more inclusive understanding of the working class, this change in what some of us call the "composition of class", the organizational implications are fundamental. We must fight to liberate our organizing efforts from the old institutions that tended to rigidify divisions.
Corporative trade unions, for example, no matter how combative and expressive of the particular needs and interests of their members, inevitably reinforce existing divisions unless they are restructured and their strategies reconfigured explicitly to overcome cleavages between sectors, between the waged and the unwaged. Unless they can be redesigned as vehicles for the circulation of struggle among different sectors, they will remain institutions of division.
Political parties, as they have been conceived in the Marxist tradition, face a parallel obsolescence. Whether revolutionary or social democratic, "working class" parties have not only had a tendency to reinforce divisions between waged and unwaged workers (by privileging the former over the latter) but they have been the organizational expression of an obsolete class composition that conceived of revolution in terms of taking over the means of production and building a socialism/communism wrapped around worker-controlled production. As long as the working class was strictly confined to the factory, it is easy to see how its horizons and political projects might be limited to the notion of take-over. But its success in freeing more and more of its time from commodity production has inevitably led to a flowering of worker imagination and desire.
Today people fight not only for control over production but for a certain freedom from production, freedom for the elaboration of their lives in a multiplicity of directions, many of which do not involve work in the Marxist sense of humans transforming non-human nature. People want to make music, to dance, to learn new ways to relate to each other (as families, as lovers, as friends, etc.), to pursue spiritual pursuits, to preserve and propagate their historical being, and many, many other things. Today we must rethink human being and destiny not in terms of a single unified collective project, no matter how gloriously conceived, but rather in terms of freeing people's time and energy for a rich proliferation of diverse activities and ways of organizing them socially. Those of us who live in cities may not dream the dreams of rural peasants who seek a recrafting of their small communities and their place within an eternal Nature, but we can understand their dreams and link our struggles in ways that make them complementary so that both they and we have greater possibilities for our different projects. Some variation of this understanding was what led thousands of grassroots activists from the industrial North to peasant villages in Southeastern Mexico, in the Summer of 1996. A similar understanding led peasants from those villages to Spain in the Summer of 1997.
The understanding of the need to build intercontinental networks of struggle has progressed from the intellectual ideas of the First International, through the failed experiments of the Second and Third, to the kinds of intercontinental networks and encounters described above and their renewed attempts at inventing new vehicles for the global circulation of struggle. One slogan from the Encounters that expresses this was "One No, Many Yeses". One "No" to Neoliberalism and capitalism more generally; "Many Yeses" to the diversity of ways of being and doing together that are being dreamed and elaborated amongst all the world's peoples. Without local bases a "global" network is meaningless. They provide the only real, material grounds of change. But without global connections and the possibilities of generalizing local struggles into global movements, local struggles are doomed to isolation and defeat. Here again, the Zapatistas are being seen by many to be prototypical: a small, geographically isolated group of indigenous peasants whose paltry army could only be crushed by the overwhelming power of the state. Yet, because of their ability to reach out and circulate their struggles across the face of the planet, they have survived (so far) and catalyzed a political earthquake in Mexico that has not only toppled the old political power structure but threatens capitalism everywhere (the Peso Crisis in December 1994 --brought on by fiscal and foreign exchange policies shaped by political events inside Mexico-- shook financial markets everywhere and forced a panicked International Monetary Fund to organize such a massive bailout as to violate its own rules).
The articles which are gathered here and translated were mostly written as contributions to the acceleration of the circulation of the Zapatistas' struggles and of all those connected with them. My work on Chiapas dates entirely from the day of the uprising although previously I had done research on other social struggles in Mexico. Since early 1994 I have been involved in solidarity work and have been studying both the Zapatistas and the role played by computer communications in the circulation of their struggles. These articles reflect those preoccupations. During the Spring of 1994 I contributed an introduction to a collection of Zapatista writings which was published on the WWW (a book which later appeared in print). Late that year, I created Chiapas95, an Internet list serve, to reduce to manageable size the huge flow of information related to these struggles around the world. I attended the First Intercontinental Encounter in Chiapas in the Summer of 1996 and managed interactive Encounter web sites during the Second Intercontinental in Spain. I have done all of these things in solidarity with a brave and imaginative group of revolutionaries but also because I think that their struggles have demonstrated the power to set an incredibly wide variety of people in motion all across the world.
I am delighted that these articles are being made available in Korean. The struggles of Korean workers, are, I believe, an important key to the future not only of East Asia but of the world. The Korean people, because of the tenacity of their resistance and capabilities of collective action --as demonstrated again and again, at Kwangju, in 1987 and last Winter-- are respected and watched by workers elsewhere. You have the possibility of having an impact that reaches far beyond your borders, into the vast mainland on your flank, into the islands to your South and beyond. As goes Asia, so goes the world. There is a great potential here and I hope that you will find as much stimulus in these reflections on the rise of the Zapatistas, on the emerging role of the computer communications in working class struggles and on Marxist theory, as so many of us have found in your own efforts.
For a long time I have been convinced that only a global movement will be adequate to the defeat of capitalism as a global system and the Zapatistas have done more, to date, to stimulate the coalescence of such a movement in this period than any thing else I have seen. There is, I believe, a great deal to be learned from this on-going experience if only we take the time to look and to listen. It is not the only conflict we need to learn from, far from it; they are multiplying daily. But it has demonstrably provided a focal point around which a great number of people involved in a wide array of struggles in many different parts of the world have been able to come together to exchange ideas, visions and strategic proposals. I invite you to examine these reflections on this experience and to add your own voices to the growing dialog.
Harry Cleaver
Austin, Texas
August 1997