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The Zapatistas have announced they are dissolving their autonomous municipalities in Chiapas.
(radiozapatista.org)
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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You're jumping the gun and honestly being a bit smug about it. It says in the article "new structure of Zapatista autonomy", which makes this sound less like a collapse and more like a cryptic announcement that they're just restructuring.......
......Noooow it could well be that the restructuring ends up bringing the movement closer to Marxism-Leninism, but y'know we'll cross that bridge when we get there. For now it's like, don't diss them, OK? The Zapatistas are our friends.
Seems they do complain about increased pressure from the government and cartels on them, accuse USA of being the cause of that, and the need to reorganise themselves to resist it.
So, even at the best possible interpretation it still means they are going in the opposite direction to anarchism, so the comment is correct. And they ARE dissolving their current organs so the headline is not incorrect too.
As they say, everyone either lives long enough to become an ML or they die. There's a reason they call it the immortal science.
It sounds a bit more than just restructuring though, these bits in particular talk about dissolution
I'm not trying to be glib about this, and obviously it would be a net positive if Zapatistas managed to succeed. However, what happened highlights the problem with the approach of building autonomous communities with the larger context of a capitalist state. And this is precisely the approach I see Anarchists advocate for.
Long term success is only possible when the end goal is for the workers to build their own state and to be able to defend it from both internal and external threats. The same problems that Zapatistas encountered will also be encountered by other movements based on similar principles.
If im reading the context as to why they have disvolved as well it seems like they are worried about the cartel mostly; it must be hard having an autonomous zone when you have state sanctioned death cults armed with the latest in american military equipment riding around doing what they want; they specifically said that they advise people not travel to attend there latest conference as the territory is too destabilized, but they havent actually said what the next form of organizing will look like.
Its likely best to wait till post-meeting when they have laid out what the future looks like for them before making any definitive statements on there collapse.
Yeah. Considering how many Marxist parties have failed to even get off the ground, there's no high horse to even sit on here.
we aren't on a high horse about this, I don't think any marxist here is happy about the Zapatistas being gone
They aren’t gone, they’re reorganizing in a more centralized way fit to fight the cartels, as far as I can tell.
Although yes, I will be more happy once I see such reorganization complete
The irony of reading hexbears and lemmygradtsy posting about how "the Zapatistas have collapsed" literally right after I saw a comment on here about how Redditors "don't actually read news, but just vibe over headlines", I swear...
Their official statement:
The region will remain in the hands of the Mexican state. Dissolution of the structures must be interrogated for conceding to the current conditions of power in Chiapas. Increases in federal troops and deepening of the existing capitalist economic dependency.
You've hacked up the quote to show only the parts you want to show. The rest of the paragraph you quoted reads as follows:
As others in this thread have been saying.... They're restructuring to address the situation with the cartels. We'll have to see what that looks like, and if it will work. But it's dishonest to characterize this as a collapse, as though they're dissolving these political organs, and nothing else. Which they're clearly saying isn't the case.
I'm going to predict that it will involve some hierarchy and authority, inevitably.
And I'm sure it will. But it feels super weird to me that this is being used to dunk on anarchists.
The Zapatistas suffer from a problem of ideological eclecticism. There are MLs, Maoists, Anarchists, liberals, and indigenous nationalists all tied up in that movement, and it can't be easily pinned down.
I wish I could find it, but I once saw an interview with Subcomandante Marcos where the interviewer asks him about international support, and he gives a somewhat exasperated sigh and a knowing look to the camera and says "yes, from the Anarchists".
There's a clear feeling from the Zapatistas, that while they're grateful for the support from western anarchists, they're also frustrated by this simplification of who and what they are by westerners.
So it just feels gross and weird to me, that one group of western leftists is using the very real, existential, struggle of a revolutionary movement (no matter how flawed), as an excuse to dunk on another group of western leftists.
Idk, maybe log off, actually
I don't see any dunking on anarchists. I see people celebrating progress.
From the OP:
From another comment:
There's clearly a dishonest interpretation of what's going on, with a revolutionary movement in the global south, being used by western leftists to dunk on other western leftists.
Dunking on? Or exulting in being proven right?
I don't personally buy this false equivalence that there are two western leftist groups engaged in a zero-sum game of one-upmanship. I see this as yet another demonstration of the futility of western anarchist cult-like thought and therefore progress being made. There are very real contradictions being resolved for those who want to see them.
The western anarchists I know in real life have moved from backing the Nazis in Ukraine to demanding condemnation of Hamas, to today whingeing about ML's because of this story. We are not the same. But I guess they're no true anarcho-Scots.
It appears you don’t understand that the Zapatistas are not in fact anarchists.
It appears then you think everyone in this thread is going off half cocked.
Have you noticed that this part of the thread has become invisible if you open the main thread?
If you see me pointing out that lack of a solid foundation leads to socialist projects dissolving as a dunk on anarchists, then that kind of says it all.
I've "hacked up" the quote to show the relevant parts of what actually happened in tangible terms. They're dissolving because they tried to create autonomy within the context of an oppressive capitalist state, and that was never going to be sustainable. You can keep pretending this isn't a collapse, but at that point you're the one being intellectually dishonest and avoiding admitting the actual reality of what this "restructuring" means.