In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels predict a proletarian revolution against the capitalist regime: “Its [of the bourgeoisie] fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (Marx & Engels, 2002, p. 233). This revolution would “replace the capitalist mode of production, based on exploitation, waste, and inequality with the socialist mode of production, based upon production for human need rather than profit” (Nesbitt-Larking, 2001, p. 117). According to Heilbroner (1980), this proletarian revolution has not materialized yet; Marxism, although essential to the analysis of capitalism, “has lost its prophetic value” (Boggs, 1986, p.10).
It was in 1986 that Carl Boggs identified the emergence of a new form of social movement in North America and Europe. These new social movements were different from previous movements and revolutions in the sense that they were not primarily grounded in labour and class struggles, as predicted by Marx; they included the active participation of a myriad of social groups including “neighborhood groups, environmentalists, women and gays, peace and anti-interventionist activists, youth and students, the unemployed, and those involved in the urban struggles of minorities, welfare recipients, tenants, squatters, and the generally disenfranchised” (Boggs, 1986, p.3). According to Boggs, the materialization of these new movements has fundamentally challenged the Marxian claim that the proletariat “is the decisive revolutionary protagonist within capitalist society” (Boggs, 1986, p.17).
There have been a number of social movements within the last decade around the world. As the North American Free Trade Alliance (NAFTA) was taking effect on January 1, 1994, a new social movement emerged under the banner of EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional translated as Zapatista Army of National Liberation). This group of women and men of all ages, both indigenous and mestizo peasants, seized the town of San Cristobal de las Casas during an armed uprising challenging the neoliberal policies and agendas being implemented by Carlos Salinas, the Mexican President. The Zapatista uprising claimed, “To us, the free trade treaty is the death certificate for the ethnic peoples of Mexico” (Blackman, 2005, p.1).
In 1999, tens of thousand of students, veterans, environmentalists, labor union members, academics, artists, among others, organized a protest to prevent the WTO conference in Seattle. Protesters blocked the entrance to the Sheraton and Roosevelt Hotels protesting against sweatshop labour, the destruction of social justice, sweatshop labour, environmental degradation, unemployment as well as growing inequality at local and international levels. The message was clear: “NO TO WTO.” A year later, in 2000, farmers, workers, cocoa growers, the unemployed, and small business owners protested against the privatization of public water supplies by Bechtel, American transnational corporation based on San Francisco. Protesters resisted against the structural adjustment programs implemented by IMF and the World Bank along the Bolivian government under President Banzer. The protest embodied a rejection of policies through which “Bolivia's most recent governments have been very obedient to these foreign commandments, selling off everything from the national airline to the electricity system” (http://www.democracyctr.org/waterwar/#war).
What do NAFTA, WTO, IMF, World Back, and Bechtel share in common and why are these social movements so passionately resisting and revolting them? In order to answer this questions, it is essential to understand NAFTA, WTO, IMF and the World Bank as transnational institutions of and for global capitalism. The author aims to analyze the materialization of new social movements as resulting from a particular historical process of political, social, and economic changes brought about by neoliberalism. The author will mainly focus on the philosophy, that of human dignity, of the Zapatista movement as the epitome of present postmodern social movements. I will then conclude with an attempt to answer “what it means to put dignity at the center of oppositional thought” (Holloway, 1997, p.2).
Neoliberalism
“Ours [Bolivia] is a small country and it hardly owns anything
any more. Our mines were privatized, the electrification company was
privatized, and the airlines, the telecommunications, the railways, our
oil and gas. The things we still own are, the water and the air, and we have
struggled to make sure that the water continues to be ours”
(Oscar Olivera, trade union leader from Cochabamba, Bolivia quoted on Assies, 2003, p.14)
In order to attempt a definition of neoliberalism, it will be helpful to examine specific examples of neoliberal policies and their social, political, and economic implication.
The documentary “Drowned Out” describes the construction of the Narmada Dam in Jalsindhi, Central India along Narmada River, traditionally revered as the most sacred rivers in India. The construction of the Narmada dam is seen as the most important development project in the history of India. However, the dam presents a threat to a number of groups of people, especially the Adivasis, indigenous people to Jalsindhi whose life is contingent on their access to the land. According to Franny Armstrong, the filmmaker, this development project represents the destruction of indigenous lands and culture leaving the Adivasis with three choices: (1) be compensated with minimal cash and move to the city and live in the slum trying to compete for a job, (2) relocate to resettlement site provided by the government with no drinkable water and no fertile soil, (3) stay at home in Jalsindhi and drown as the water devours their homes. The irony of the Narmada dam situation is that the water system that is to be developed for the greater good of India, is to be commodified, primarily serving the elite and the urban areas neglecting the ecological and social needs of farmers, indigenous peoples. Within this context, we can argue that the Adivasis are an externality of the neoliberal project of development. Externalities can be defined as the social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental consequences of the global regime of capitalism for which no institution, especially the corporations, can be held accountable for. From this example, we can compare neoliberalism to Robbins’ analysis of the culture of capitalism as characterized by an (1) increase in the division of world wealth and the resulting unequal access to resources; (2) changes in the organization of capital resulting in an increasing concentration of economic and political power in fewer transnational corporations; and (3) the increase in the level of economic globalization resulting in the change of the structures and roles of the nation-state and the concentration of power on international institutions such as IMF and World Bank that support and maintain the global capitalist status quo. For instance, in regards to hunger and poverty, Robbins (2005) estimates that 1.2 billion people live on less than one dollar per day; almost 3 billion people live on less than two dollars per day; 250,000 children, an equivalent to 1,500 per hour, die from hunger and hunger related diseases; 42 percent of all deaths in periphery countries are attributed to infection diseases as resulting from malnutrition, poverty, and unsanitary living conditions. These are only the most accessible statistics that reflect that neoliberalism “has not brought more rapid economic growth, reduced poverty, or made economies more stable” (Tabb, 2003) as claimed by its advocates. According to William K. Tabb (2003), the neoliberal policies have actually retarded growth, increased poverty to an unprecedented degree, and resulted in epidemic economic and financial crises around the world. Neoliberalism has inherently built within it a contradiction between “the included and the excluded – those who can regularly participate in the formal institutions of society, politics and the economy, and those who are able to do so only intermittently, or not at all” (NACLA, 2005). It is this neoliberal practice of systematic exclusion, oppression, and domination that the new social movements resist and rebel against: “seeing themselves as both equal and different, the excluded of ‘modernity’ weave together resistances against neoliberalism, which eventually requires a global coordination of the excluded” (Rosset et al., 2005, p.36).
Zapatismo Reassessing Modernity: The New Left
According to Rosset et al., the Zapatista uprising on January 1, 1994, has marked a defining moment of revolutionary and progressive thought, a re-awakening of the global left as well as the replacement of the old Left “from the lethargy and depression brought on by the collapse of the socialist bloc and the apparent triumph of neoliberalism and free trade ideology” (Rosset et al., 2005, p.35). Although one cannot identify the Zapatista movement as marking the new form of social movements, we can argue that it has influenced new oppositional discourse. One difference between new social movements to the previous classical modern Marxist revolution is that whereas classical modernist revolutions were primarily based on class and economic struggles, the new social movements we are experiencing today are much more broad in praxis. The Marxist-Leninist language of revolution is challenged by Zapatismo as not being able to reflect the true conditions of the daily indigenous experiences of survival. Mayan indigenous peoples refer to the theories of Marx and Lenin as “palabra dura” (Eschle, 2005, p. 88) which is translated as the hard word. The hard word refers to the rhetoric of revolution that does “not ring true to the Indians of la selva (the jungle)” (Eschle, 2005, p.88). As a postmodern politics of social change, Zapatismo aims to reveal the complex matrix and interlocking systems of domination and oppression, also referred to as subaltern identities that include gender, unemployment, environmentalism, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. Subcomandante Marcos, spokesperson of the Zapatista movement, reflects on the inclusive character of new social movements in Globalization and Postmodern Politics (Burbach, 2001, p. 118):
“Marcos is Gay in San Francisco, a black in South Africa, Asian in Europe,
a Chicano in San Isidro, and [sic] anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel…
a sexist in the feminist movement, a woman alone in a Metro station at 10 p.m…
a peasant without land… an unemployed worker, a doctor with no office…”
Thus, Zapatismo embraces the sense of alienation that is found within every human being living in a world of oppression and fragmentation.
One of the central characteristics and strengths of Zapatismo is the challenge against the modernist and classical revolutionary thought (Holloway, 1997, Burbach, 2001; Kingsnorth, 2003; Eschel & Maiguashca, 2005) of Marxism-Leninism as a “tradition of talking” which reflects the modernist belief that “theory (‘class consciousness’) must be brought to the masses by the party” (Holloway, 1997, p.4). According to Blackman (2005), the classical socialism embeds within it a heavy European bias that reflects the incompatibility of a Marxist revolution in our globalized world. The classical top down model of revolution, according to the Zapatistas, is anti-democratic in that it replaces power rather than to decentralize it. Zapatismo, among other new social movements such as the Battle of Seattle and the New Social Forum in Porto Alegre, is a movement that aims to change the world without taking over the already established structures of power for, according to Subcomandante Marcos, the struggle for power is the main source of oppression that characterizes neoliberalism in the realms of politics, economic, and cultural.
Zapatismo is also postmodern in its assault and rejection of neo-liberal modernization politics as materialized in two major institutions: the bureaucratic state and academic disciplines. Zapatismo can be argued to be an anti-state movement on the grounds that the state is seen as an institution of imperialism and oppression that excludes the majority in order to protect the interest of a few. Within the context of globalization and neoliberalism, the documentary The New Rulers of the World argues that corporations have become the new rulers of the world by expanding their economic and political influence through processes of globalization and economic integration. International institutions such as IMF and World Bank and powerful nation-states, mostly U.S., maintain and perpetuate these neoliberal processes and policies by providing economic and military support which often times leading to violence, war and terror.
Zapatismo is also a postmodern “rejection of positivism” (Holloway, 1997, p.9) as a paradigm of oppression and exploitation through which the western knowledge system has imposed as the universal system “spread[ing] by violence and misrepresentation” (Shiva, 1993, p. 3) marginalizing all alternative world views and systems of knowledge. The environmental policies of the World Bank clearly reflect the positivist paradigm that justifies and legitimized exploitation of Third World countries. Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank during 1991, argued that it was economically logical for the United States to “export its pollution and toxic waste to poor countries” (Robbins, 2005, p.229). The rationale behind Summers’ arguments are outlined by Robbins as follows:
- The lives of people in the Third World, judged by “foregone earnings” from illness and death, are worth less – hundreds of times less – than those of individuals in advanced capitalist countries where wages are hundreds of times higher…
- Third World environments are underpolluted compared to places such as Los Angeles and Mexico City
- A clean environment, in effect, is a luxury good pursued by rich countries because of the aesthetic and health standards in those countries. Thus, the worldwide cost of pollution could decrease of waste was transferred to poor countries where a clean environment is “worth” less, rather than polluting environments of the rich where a clean environment is “worth” more
This quote unveils the international institutions appropriation of positivist knowledge into economics that reduces all social, economic and political issues to matters of figures and statistics that prioritize the powerful.
The formation of EZLN reflects the diversity of culture and knowledge systems upon which it is built: a fusion of worldviews including “indigenous utopias, agrarian struggles, the Guevarism of ‘Che,’ and the liberation theology” (Rosset et al., 2005, p.38) as well as “radical feminist approaches to movement construction” (Eschle, 2005, p.26). Zapatismo embraces the context specific knowledge that gives local people authority and legitimacy. The Zapatista conception of time epitomizes this fusion of knowledge: in an interview with Television Espanola, Subcomandante Marcos explains why he is wearing two watches: the watch on the right represents the time of civil society, bureaucracy and the state and the watch on the left represents the indigenous time of war. The contradiction of these two time frames is most evident when during treaties the state requires the Zapatistas to present a decision in a matter of hours whereas Zapatismo requires a consensus reached through a democratic collective dialogue on any given issue which can take up to six months. Marcos explains during this interview that the goal of Zapatismo is get past the dichotomy of time of these two worlds and reach the hour of understanding and peace.
Zapatismo also challenges the academic structure of knowledge whereby the “fragmentation of the world into the disciplines of social science, those disciplines which break reality and in breaking, exclude, suppressing the suppressed” (Holloway, 1997, p.9). It is the systematic separation between morality and politics that allows the “formally democratic regimes all over the world to co-exist with growing levels of poverty and social marginalization” (Holloway, 1997, p.10). The neoliberal democracy only extends to the ability of one to participate in the market, whereas the neoliberal liberty is often represented as the freedom to shop (as emphasized by G.W. Bush in his speech after 9/11), and finally, the neoliberal justice refers to the necessity to police and punish through the penal system, which is increasingly being privatized. For instance, the documentary This Is What Democracy Looks Like states that corporate ownership of American prison has grown 1000 percent due to its source of cheap labour.
The fragmentation of the social science discipline in the analysis of our society has a fetishizing effect. The formal institutions and power relations are often times reified; this veils the source of domination and oppression: from this vantage point, a holistic view of society is very difficult, if not impossible. The struggle of Zapatismo against positivism is materialized within its very communication efforts that take “the form of stories and myths” (Holloway, 1997, p.4). The Zapatistas rely on folk culture and traditional systems of knowledge and beliefs such as dance, stories, jokes, songs, poems, etc. The Zapatista choice of expression through poetry and stories is, according to Eschle and Maiguashca, a political statement of rejection and “an attempt to disrupt and disturb the government’s monopoly on truth and fact” (Eschle & Maiguashca, 2005, p. 88). Zapatismo attempts to recuperate the reality of oppression, alienation, and inhumanity that are often times excluded from the discourse of the state, academia, and even that of classical revolutionary thought.
Dignity as the foundation of new revolutionary thought
“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 [sic], 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 [sic] 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”
(Holloway, 1997, p.1)
Dignity is defined by Holloway as the “refusal to accept humiliation and dehumanization, [and] the refusal to confirm” (Holloway, 1997, p.1). This concept of dignity is central to the Zapatista movement which aims to “convert dignity and rebellion into freedom and dignity” (Holloway, 1997, p.1). But what does it mean to have a social movement that revolves around dignity? A global society ruled by the capitalist regime whereby the interests of the powerful have a devastating effect on universal democracy, justice, and freedom, can be described as a society characterized by inhumanity, terror, and injustice.
Within the context of globalization, the struggle for dignity is a struggle against the systematic oppression of the majority. According to Zapatismo, every human being has the right to claim his/her dignity. Capitalism, from this perspective, is an “increasingly inhuman society” (Holloway, 1997, p.2) characterized by the growing focus on the never-ending accumulation of capital, profit, and commodities that takes precedence over the wellbeing of humanity in general. Ours is a society of alienation. According to Rosset et al., Zapatismo, as a struggle of neoliberalism, implies the imperative to (re)constructing a new humanism which arises “from the recognition of oneself in the other, the subjugation, humiliation and annihilation of the other, which are the negation of humanity [of noeliberalim]” (Rosset et al., 2005, p.36). Within global capitalism therefore, the claim to dignity is not limited to the indigenous peoples in Mexico claiming for their rightful use to common lands, healthcare, and education. The claim to dignity crosses the constructed borders of geography, ethnicity, gender, or any other categories of social classification. The claim to dignity is universal in that every human being is entitled to the same right, that of freedom, justice, and democracy. The struggle for dignity therefore becomes “the struggle of (and for) human existence in an oppressive society, as relevant to life in Edinburgh, Athens, Tokyo, Los Angeles…” (Holloway, 1997, p.1) for “those without voice, without face, without tomorrow” (Le Bot, 1997, p.206). For the first time, we can argue, there materialized an all-inclusive and subaltern movement that takes account of the matrix of domination.
The struggle for dignity is an unorthodox revolutionary approach. The revolution of dignity endeavors to “learn to hear, to listen” (Holloway, 1997, p.4). In other words, the struggle for dignity is a revolution based on dialogue prioritizing the opportunity to learn from others and celebrating new unorthodox perspectives. As a dialogical revolution, it is self-reflective as well as self-creative making of the revolution “a question rather than an answer” (Holloway, 1997, p.5). The revolution of dignity, as materialized in the Zapatista movement, does not and cannot therefore be a blueprint or recipe for new world order (Jeffries, 2001; Seoane, 2004): although the goal is to reach a society based on democracy, freedom and justice, the Zapatista movement is not able to provide a manual and a map to such goals: “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” (Holloway, 1997, p.6). Thus the struggle for dignity reconceptualizes revolution as a revolution that not only defies definition but “is essentially anti-definitional” (Holloway, 1997, p.8). The focus on human dignity allows Zapatismo to understand the process of definition as a process that inherently excludes. How many people are being excluded by the neoliberal rhetoric of democracy, freedom, and justice? I believe too many: women, the hungry, the young, the old, the ill, the poor, the very young and the old, the transsexual, the homosexual, the worker, the farmer, the landless, the colored. The reliance on human dignity as a pivotal element of social change allows the Zapatista movement to become a “revolution of revolution” (Holloway, 1997, p.1)
When the Zapatista movement focuses on human dignity, it focuses on the one common ground where all human beings can come to a universal understanding. When we focus on human dignity as a theory and practice of social movements, we fight against fragmentation and exclusion. One major argument presented by the documentary “This Is What Democracy Looks Like” is that fragmentation is the tool of the powerful to maintain and further prioritize their interests. Numerous activists state, “ while corporations build empires across borders, we are fenced in. We are taught to fear each other, and isolation leaves us powerless.” Another activist argues, “Our coming together is where our power is, so it makes sense that they [WTO, multinational corporations, state] would focus on our differences and division.” Here we can see that by focusing on dignity as the central concept of social movements, differences are seen rather as strengths and are therefore celebrated.
Conclusion
There have been a growing number of social movements emerging around the world under the flag of anti-globalization, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, social justice and human rights movements. Although specific to a certain social issue, every movement can be understood as a rejection to globalization or certain aspects of globalization: they struggle against political and economic institutions of neoliberal capitalism; they are each internally composed of a variety of ideologies, peoples, and strategies; they promote horizontality and autonomy and reject any form of top-down exercise of power; they fight for a more humane society where ‘people come before profits.’ I do agree with Patricia King and Francisco Javier when they state that the “essential contribution of the Zapatistas…was to demonstrate democracy to those on the Left who preached revolution, and demonstrate revolution to those advocating democracy” (Holloway & Pealez, 1998, p.122).
Zapatismo can be considered as one of the most widely known ““new social movement” (NSM) school, which begins from the assumption that there have been profound changes in recent activism, responding to structural shits in late modernity” (Eschle & Maiguashca, 2005, p. 19). According to Jose Seoane, the Zapatista uprising has become the “reference for the growing anti-globalization movement that was gradually taking shape in both the North and the South” (Seoane, 2004, p.384). The Zapatista revolution has become the first step towards global movements of resistance and rebellion against globalization that have paved the way for the Battle of Seattle in 1999 and the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2001; they voice their frustrations against liberalism its policies, and institutions, which according to the world’s majority of both North and South, make no sense. This new generation of social movements share the philosophy of Zapatismo: (1) power is not to be concentrated at the government level, it needs to be developed from below at the community level “to be used by and for the people it affects” (Kingsnorth, 2003, p.20) and (2) decentralization of power can only be achieved if people “rise up as a community” (Kingsnorth, 2003, p.20).
Research on these new social movements which are increasing in occurrence as well as in the number of participants makes me believe that what we are experiencing is one revolution: the revolution of dignity against neoliberalism and its inherent negation of human dignity. This new revolution materializes sporadically in different corners of the world as the manifestation of counter-hegemonic discourses that have been allowed to emerge from the breaking down of traditional state apparatuses and changing geographical spheres of social interaction. Thus, each and every new social movement is a precise moment of one larger revolution against this negation of dignity. The nature of these movements reflect the globalization that results in the increasing opening of a “new political space of contestation as it ruptures existing patterns of relations between state and civil society” (Stahler-Sholk, 2001, p.1).
There are a number of questions left unanswered in this piece. For instance, what does a revolution that ‘walks asking’ and ‘to command obeying’ look like against a struggle against an inherently inhuman regime look like? How can we create a powerless and/or egalitarian society without perpetuating social relations of oppression of domination? What will happen after all forms and sources of alienation are defeated with dignity? Why are new social movements, especially Zapatismo, inherently ambiguous and contradictory? Zapatistas admit the ambiguity of their movement. Ambiguity and contradictions of Zapatismo might be considered weaknesses if we do not ourselves challenge our framework of understanding. In the process of analyzing Zapatismo, we might not be defining the movement itself; we might be defining our own perspectives and our assumptions and contradictions.
With strong reasons, Roger Burbach (2001) has cautioned us not to fall into the trap of romantizing the Zapatista movement and the struggle of dignity. The aim of this paper has not been to romanticize the Zapatismo although personally it has been difficult. The aim here is to understand new social movements as a postmodern discourse of hope for alternative paths to human development before economic development. Throughout the process of research and writing this paper, I have come to realize that my research reflects a sense of urgency in adopting a new form of discourse through which we can “bring theory down to the level of the human being, to what is lived, to share with the people the experiences that makes it possible to continue living” (Eschle & Maiguashca, 2005, p.99). Adopting the philosophy of Zapatismo, my goal has been to present a research “not directed to the head… [but] aims to the heart, the part most forgotten” (Le Bot, 1997, p.356).
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