The Zapatista movement of southern Mexico introduced their democratic practices to the world in L@s Escuelit@s or “Little Schools” this past August. The Escuelit@ attracted over one thousand interested folks from all over the world and more attended by webcast, an auspicious beginning to the newest phase of the twenty-year-old movement.
While the Zapatistas are well-known for taking democracy to be central among both their demands and their practices, until recently not much was known outside the mostly indigenous movement participants about what democracy meant for them. With the prospect of ongoing Zapatista Escuelit@s over the next several years, it seems that what was known will increase rapidly.
The “Little Schools” began with lectures by those elected to teach at the Escuelit@ followed by several days of observing daily life in the Zapatista autonomous communities and responses to questions by the Escuelit@ teachers on the final day. Students in this first version of the Escuelit@s were sent to any one of the five autonomous zones or “caracoles,” as they are known in the movement, in the state of Chiapas, so not all heard from the same teachers. Those who attended by live streaming webcast heard a different version than those who attended in person. However, all shared the same textbooks: four pamphlets and two DVDs published by the Zapatistas on autonomous governance, resistance, and women’s participation. This combination of diverse experiences woven together by a common thread typifies the movement, which is well-known for attempting to build, as their saying goes, “a world where many worlds belong.”
On the first day of “L@ Escuelit@” on August 12, the twenty or so teachers in Caracol IV, commonly known as Morelia or by its formal name “The Whirlwind of Our Words,” quickly got to discussion of democracy in their lectures. After the first teacher (a woman) briefly reviewed the impacts of colonization on the indigenous, the next two speakers, Eliazar and Elia, also both women, introduced the notions of “liberty” and “democracy” respectively.
For Eliazar liberty includes the ability to analyze independently, to not have an analysis imposed on the community, so that the lies of the system that claims democracy for itself can be refused. Once this liberty came to be practiced, then the Zapatista community developed a proposal for a new kind of democracy, one that diverges from that of the Mexican government.
To Elia that distinctive form of democracy consists in elected representatives at all levels of government, together with local popular assemblies where the people decide what they can do and what they want to do. Rather than policy decisions being made by elected representatives, the popular assemblies make the decisions and the representatives carry them out. These assembly decisions are the basis for the well-known Zapatista saying, “The People Command and the Government Obeys.” Through this process, Elia emphasized, democracy is not something that takes place at election time, as it is for the Mexican government, but democracy is something talked about in the Zapatista autonomous communities every moment.
In commenting on what the visitors observed in the autonomous villages during L@ Escuelit@, the influential Uruguayan commentator Raúl Zibechi remarked, “[T]hey constructed an autonomy of economics, of health, of education, and of power. Or we might say an autonomy that comprises all aspects of life.” I would suggest that the day-to-day, moment-to-moment democratic discussion which Elia pointed to is a significant part of what Zibechi calls the autonomy of all aspects of life.
As Zibechi has argued elsewhere (p. 207-214), autonomy movements require a shift from demands and representation to self-construction and self-determination (214), as old identities and social relations are evacuated to inscribe new relations in new territories through autonomous self-organization. Under autonomy, democracy extends well beyond the voting booth, the political party, the campaign field office, the mass media outlet, and the civics classroom, and even the national government to rewrite social power relations pervasively. This is what Zibechi means by an autonomy of power.
We observed this constructive, moment-to-moment democratic practice in various settings during the Escuelit@. We encountered elected representatives not only in the political offices of the caracol, but also as teachers of the Escuelit@ itself and at the secondary school and the health clinic, and even in our day-to-day encounter with the person assigned as our constant companion through the days of the Escuelit@. While we did not see any popular assemblies in action, students at the Escuelit@ observed various large-group decision-making meetings as we made our way through the various collective activities in local autonomous communities, in cow pastures and next to the cow pens, next to the women’s bread collective building, outside a school house, in the coffee fields, and elsewhere.
Each meeting took time, as different participants said their piece and the group worked out its decision collectively. Men and women, young and old, all participated on the same footing, except in meetings when the work groups were divided by gender. Gender-specific work group decisions were made by their respective gender groups, but the overall material, financial, and symbolic outcomes are managed by the Good Government offices that are mixed gender in makeup.
Through these daily practices the autonomous communities are rejecting more than the anti-democratic characteristics of the Mexican electoral system, known to the Zapatistas as the “bad government.” They are also rejecting many of hierarchies of Mexican society by making room for women and young people in leadership and for men and elders to do childcare, for those who identify as “otras” (neither male nor female) to join into what are otherwise gender-divided social setting, and for the indigenous to claim their rights to education, healthcare, and the freedom to analyze and govern their own affairs.
The Zapatistas are quick to note in the textbooks and webcasts for their Escuelit@s that their practices are not perfect: that gender equity is very much still a project in process; that collective work is not carried out in all villages; that not everybody has basic services. If democracy is grounded in such a form of equality that extends well beyond the modernist emphasis on voting and representation to rewrite social relations and property laws, then democracy requires a weakening of the social hierarchies that are under siege in the Zapatista autonomous areas.
The Zapatistas seem to have turned towards a democracy by and for the common, in Wendy Brown’s words, rather than towards a democracy by and for individual freedom that some think characterizes the modern democracy of Kant, Rousseau, and Mill. In this way they are carrying out an attempt to extend equality beyond the voting rights alone that limits the equality of many modern democracies. Rather than granting freedom the priority over equality that historically has preserved hierarchies, exclusions, and violences, as Brown has suggested, this democratic practice attacks normative social powers and discourses to reshape them in a way that constitutes new social subjects under equality however incomplete and partial.
The significance of these democratic practices will only emerge over time as knowledge of them spreads to other social movements, regions, and gendered colonial histories. As Zibechi suggests in concluding his analysis of the Escuelit@s, new territories characterized by the rejection of what Agamben calls the concentration camp form of life under the modern nation-state open up many possibilities to those excluded from class mobility. It also introduces many possible strategies for movements that reject racial, age, and gender hierarchies, limits on sexual diversity of various sorts, regional and linguistic exclusions and violences (both colonial and postcolonial), and other major vectors of inequality under the modern.
As the newly-established Zapatista schools spread literacy, anti-colonial and democratic histories, and other avenues to class mobility, what subjects will emerge? Modern subject positionalities as most of us know them are characterized largely by their interest in promoting bourgeois exploitation. So Gayatri Spivak has suggested that refusing class apartheid and supplementing internal class relations and hegemonic institutions may reject the limits on the emergence into class mobility so that subjects may refuse to become what Paulo Freiere called “sub-oppressors.”
The fruitful and constructive aspect of Spivak’s notion of the subaltern is that it directs us to give attention to the distant but necessary horizon of the end of exploitation, which fortunately would also be the end of the category of the subaltern. Elia’s pointing to a democracy of “every moment” and Zibechi’s argument for an autonomy not only of economics but also of power through new social relations and new territorializations may help us move towards that horizon more forcefully. The Zapatista autonomous caracoles are places where such democratic relations are coming into being every day, however incompletely and imperfectly, making another world possible.
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