GLOBAL CAPITAL AND GLOBAL STRUGGLES:
THE MAKING OF A NEW INTERNATIONALISM
AND THE ZAPATISTAS' VOICE
October 1997 (DRAFT)
GLOBAL CAPITAL AND GLOBAL STRUGGLES:
THE MAKING OF A NEW INTERNATIONALISM
AND THE ZAPATISTAS' VOICE
October 1997 (DRAFT)
1. Introduction.
In the last decade or so, many labour, environmental, human and civil rights activists belonging to different movements have turned increasingly to different forms of international action. This is understandable, especially considering the level and speed of capital's globalizing processes and its consequence on wages, intensity of labour and work conditions; women's increased unwaged labour to supplant the global heavy cuts in social spending; the continuing human rights abuses often perpetrated in collusion with multinational corporations like Shell in Nigeria and BP in Columbia; the international trade in slaves, the use of child labour drawn in the production cycle of transnational corporations; the continuing destruction of the environmental conditions of our existence, reproduction and nature; and so on.
The growth of this international activism is widely recognised, and does not need to be further emphasized here. However, what seems to me insufficiently addressed in most current debates, is a discussion of what meaning can be given to these international practices beyond their mere instrumentality in relation to the particular aim or purpose of a campaign. In other words, is there a pattern or trend or, better, a common thread that can be envisaged in the various practices of the many different movements that are turning the entire world into a picket line?[1] What is the meaning of this common thread, what is, if any, the "future in the present" represented by these developments, what kind of world, what kind of life do the concrete practices of these movements point at? These questions are, I believe, of fundamental importance if we want to recuperate and voice a discourse of liberation, an image of hope and a vision of a different world that not only challenge the only possible future envisaged by both neoliberal left and neoliberal right, but which also is rooted in the practice of real movements. One of the aims of this paper is to suggest that a common thread is developing and a new internationalism is making itself. This new internationalism is not the adaptation to a preconceived idea, but it originates out of practical necessity by different movements in their reciprocal interaction within the context of the global economy.
Another related aim of this paper is to speculate about the political visions embedded in these movements once they are taken as a totality. Among the many movements at the international level, perhaps the Zapatistas are the one that most have explicitly or implicitly voiced a vision of a different world developed from within the old. This movement gives us important insights about the conditions of struggle in today's world and gives us important insights about the constitutive direction taken by new practices. Therefore, in the second part of this paper I will discuss what I perceive is the Zapatistas' use and understanding in practice, as well as in thought, of internationalism. The importance of this reference point is, in my opinion, fundamental for a very obvious traditional reason: Zapatistas' internationalism is rooted in the material conditions of today's class struggle at the international level. These material conditions are not only reflected by the fact that the Zapatistas' practice would not have been possible without Internet technology (fact that I take for granted here and will not investigate further)[2] but also, and more importantly, that the indigenous population of Chiapas is, taken in isolation from the international division of labour, absolutely nobody and invisible.[3] This invisibility, this complete atomization and fragmentation of an entire population within the huge global productive machine is not only a characteristic of the Maya people in south-east of Mexico. It is increasingly a condition of existence of all kinds of people and individuals, once they are understood in terms of their relation to the global factory. Neoliberalism is the forced commoditization and marketization of every aspect of life on a planetary scale, and this commoditization implies essentially atomization and invisibility. The internationalism proposed by the Zapatistas, their practice and their writings, not only reflects this general condition we all face vis-à-vis neoliberal capital, but also, thanks to the specificity of the Maya indigenous conditions, helps to shed light on possible political strategies of emancipation.
