#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #CZECH #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) Czech, AFED: Ricardo Flores Magón and the EZLN (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Magón 2022: Ian Campbell searches for points of contact between Magón's ideas and

contemporary Zapatista practice. ---- The Neo-Zapatistas entered the new year of
1994 with an insurgent spirit that the Mexican government was only too sure had
been suppressed years earlier. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party
(Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI) was supposed to be the fulfillment of
all the revolutionary energy left over from the struggles of the first decade of
the 20th century. However, while PRI politicians were celebrating the New Year in
style, an army of mostly Mayan rebels stormed San Cristobal de Las Casas and
other towns in southern Mexico, guns in hand. The shocked media covered the event
as if the Zapatistas were something new and not part of a long tradition of
indigenous anti-capitalist rebellions that draw inspiration from their
traditional culture and historical figures such as Emiliano Zapata and the
anarchist Flores Magón brothers. In the years since the 1994 uprising,

As a small group of guerillas from Mexico City took refuge in the mountains,
their avant-garde views on social revolution were transformed by close contact
with Mayan communal customs. They were forced to develop the critique of state
power previously expressed by anarchists such as Ricardo Flores Magón. The
founding cadre of what later became known as the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación
Nacional (EZLN) arrived in the Lacandon jungle in 1982. The group's politics were
deeply rooted in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, and as a guerrilla movement they
had as their main objective "the overthrow of the regime and taking power to the
people'. Subcomandante Marcos, known as the spokesperson of the EZLN, and thus of
the so-called Zapatistas, describes his original proposal as "completely
undemocratic and authoritarian". This attitude echoed the indigenous tradition of
collective defence, collective life and collective governance in the area, until
more community members joined the EZLN and indigenous forms of decision-making
prevailed. Although the Zapatistas quickly shed the notion that they were the
vanguard of the revolution, they carried with them a desire for state power into
the early days of their armed rebellion. When the trip to Mexico City became
militarily unfeasible, the Zapatistas again had to respond to practical
necessity. This temporary delay in their plans apparently translated into an
ideological distrust of the state. Marcos reflected this self-critical shift in
the Zapatistas' position at a public event in August 1994, when he proclaimed the
principle of "suggesting, not imposing" and clarified: "...we neither want nor
are we able to occupy the place that some hope we will occupy." Marcos' statement
signaled identification with the fact that a Zapatista government in Mexico City
is neither feasible nor desirable;The Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle ,
when the Zapatistas declared themselves "a political force that fights against
the state-party system...that does not fight to take political power". The
refusal to take over state power represented a significant departure from the
Marxist-Leninist dogmas that Marcos and his comrades brought with them into the
jungle.

Almost a hundred years before the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Ricardo Flores
Magón declared himself an anarchist, an enemy of all hierarchical power
relations. The Zapatistas reject all traditional ideological labels: Marxist,
anarchist, and communist, and in many ways have synthesized elements of several
left-wing ideologies with traditional Mayan attitudes. Their preference for
decentralized and horizontal relationships between people places them firmly in
the legacy of Magón and the Mexican Liberal Party. Magón and the anarchists in
their periodical Regeneracióneven in their 1911 manifesto they made it clear that
power corrupts all who seize it, no matter how "well-intentioned" they are, and
that putting someone in power is a wasted effort. In this spirit, the New
Zapatistas hoped to build a Mexico of "those who do not build ladders to climb
above others, but who look beside themselves to find the other and make them
their compañera or compañera." Anarchists in Mexico's Liberal Party, "convinced
that political freedom does not benefit the poor but only palace hunters,"
pounced on anyone trying to enter parliament. Magón preferred direct action,
often through armed raids on border towns and expropriations during strikes, and
it is likely that he would have viewed the Zapatistas who vandalized polling
stations during the 1997 "fake" congressional elections as a welcome development.
He began to despise anyone who tried to rule, whether they claimed to be
revolutionaries or not. The Liberal Party changed from a reformist to a
revolutionary organization toward the end of Porfirio Díaz's rule, and Magón was
horrified that Francisco Madero had preserved all the mechanisms of the Porfirio
state. Most scandalously, the Mexican army led by Madero suppressed an anarchist
uprising in Baja California in 1911. Magón declared war on all future governors.
There were only two options for him: "a new yoke" or "expropriation of life" of
all who aspire to rule. The Zapatistas, like Flores Magón, knew that freedom did
not mean being able to "change masters every six years," but "extending
participation to all areas of life," in other words, complete autonomy. Through
experience and self-criticism, both the Mexican Liberal Party and the EZLN have
revealed the nature of state power,

The core of the analysis of the world full of sharp contrasts in which Ricardo
Flores Magón and the Zapatistas found themselves was the abolitionist critique of
capitalism and the expropriation prescription as a cure. Both were based on the
Marxist assessment of capitalism as a system that opposes two diametrically
opposed classes. They saw the reality of this class struggle in everyday life,
because the hacendadosor their corporate successors tended to subjugate more and
more of the communal sphere to the private sphere, to expropriate farmers and
force them to sell their labor for wages. Finally, both saw their ultimate goal
in a world in which the maxim "all things for all" would be put into practice.
The main difference between the Zapatistas and the Magonistas can be found in the
speed with which the old society is to be destroyed and the new one built.
Ricardo Flores Magón was apparently a native himself and grew up in the practice
of native communes - ejidos. Enrique, Ricardo's brother, said that the land
around them was jointly owned and that they took care of it by working together.
He explained before a Los Angeles jury that he and his brother were "communist
anarchists" because they were "Indians, proletarians... witnesses of great
injustices." Ricardo fondly remembered the idyllic times in indigenous
communities that owned and worked the land together and were not governed by
authority but by mutual support. He deplored the capitalist system in which "each
man had to compete with the other for a loaf of bread" while "natural wealth was
wrested from them for the benefit of the neighboring landowners". For Ricardo,
the 1911 manifesto of the Mexican Liberal Party was a "moral guide" to be adopted
by the natives and all other proletarians. Even in the 1906 manifesto, which was
a much more reformist liberal plan, "called for the return of land to the Yaquis
of Sonora and the Mayas of the Yucatan Peninsula". As an anarchist, he would
reject the idea that the government or anyone else should be the one to
expropriate land for the Maya. Instead, he would call on the Maya to seize land
from the owners themselves, exulting in this very phenomenon during the Mexican
Revolution, when "the proletariat seized the land without waiting for paternal
rule." This is exactly what the Mayans would do in 1994 under the banner of the EZLN.

Even before the uprising, the indigenous Mayans living in the Lacandon jungle
began small-scale expropriation. During the ten years of martial and social
preparation leading up to the uprising, campesinos went unarmed and occupied land
not maintained by absentee landowners. They built houses on the land and
cultivated it together. For this they faced brutal and often collective
punishment. In the decades after the Mexican Revolution, the Mayans were given
some of the worst and rockiest soil in their wine. The best land was owned by
wealthy landowners who operated an almost feudal economy in conditions not much
better than before the revolution. Under the provisions of the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which entered into force on January 1, 1994, the
article of the Mexican constitution that protected traditional communal land
tenure, ejidos, repealed, and NAFTA opened up even the little holdings the Mayans
had to potential exploitation by corporations. So there is a reason why the EZLN
chose this particular day to rise up. Their first task was to expropriate the
land that had been privatized. Among the land liberated by the Zapatistas by
force and the land left vacant by fleeing owners, "about 340 private farms
representing 50,000 hectares" were seized in the first six months of 1994 alone.
The EZLN, never one to shy away from self-criticism, admitted that progress in
transferring confiscated land to collective administration had been slow, but
that the "land problem" had improved significantly in the following years.

Even the Zapatistas stopped short of Flores Magón's radical demands for the
redistribution of all means of life through thorough expropriation. Flores Magón
would welcome the uprising in Chiapas, but criticize it for not going far enough.
He called for "all industry ... shops ... and houses" to be taken over by those
who work or live in them. As long as any means of production, distribution or
exchange are in the hands of the boss, people will continue to be exploited.
Although the Zapatistas did not completely abolish capitalist relations in their
territories, they enabled the continuous growth of cooperative workplaces and
collectively cultivated land. Faced with exploitation from all sides since the
first Spanish ship landed in the "New World," indigenous peoples have had no
choice but to build a culture of cooperation that is "the only means of survival,
resistance, of dignity and defiance" in stark contrast to the "capitalist rule of
'the many in the hands of the few'. Collective labor was an ancient practice that
was strong in Chiapas even before the rebellion, even noted in several writings
by Ricardo Flores Magón. During the clandestine period in the ten years before
the uprising, "the compañeros pooled their labor to produce corn, beans,
chickens, and sheep," doing "everything in labor collectives, almost as if it
were socialism." After the uprising, many compañeros "went to the reclaimed
lands... to work and cultivate collectively." These collectives were largely
formed by self-organization out of necessity, not at the behest of any authority.
Collective work in Zapatista territory is not ordered by anyone; it comes from
the cohesion "born in community, from people living in each other's shadow... it
is the inner form of community harmony". It's fascinating

It is unlikely that Ricardo Flores Magón could have predicted how much the world,
even insurgent communities, would become dependent on the market as a result of
the neoliberalization of capital. The Zapatistas were unable to abolish money,
nor were they able to completely isolate themselves from the capitalist economy.
Even though much of their work is internally structured in a non-hierarchical
way, with the workers themselves deciding what will be produced, how the workers
will be paid, and so on, neoliberalism has destroyed the ability of the vast
majority of people, including Zapatista cooperatives, to be self-sufficient.
Neoliberal ideology caused this by incentivizing the destruction and/or
privatization of resources and forcing localities into export economies. The
Mexican government also waged an economic war against the Zapatistas by that it
provided special resources to non-Zapatista indigenous communities and prevented
the Zapatistas from competing with state-subsidized industry. Despite these
pressures, the Zapatistas found ways to survive while resisting privatization by
selling specialty products like coffee around the world, protecting local seeds,
and attracting workers by giving them autonomy. Many communities have also opened
cooperative stores that sell cheap, wholesale regional foods and are self-managed
by community members. The return to more widespread collective work also meant a
blurring of gendered work, reflected in the Women's Revolutionary Law, one of the
first binding precedents put forward by Zapatista communities. The unique
circumstances facing the Maya in the late 20th century meant that the Zapatistas
had to slowly build a society, where "everything is for everyone", community by
community. By no means did they achieve Ricardo Flores Magón's goal of a
completely stateless, classless, and moneyless society, but they made significant
strides toward it in land collectivization, house building, and transportation.

The Neozapatistas had to solve many practical points that for Magón existed only
on a theoretical level, they adopted the form of consensual decision-making and
the rotation of delegates for their self-organization. Magón was never able to
successfully put his ideas into practice in the long term, and true to anarchist
form he avoided in his writings too much prescription of what a free society
might actually look like. Probably the least elaborated part of the Mexican
Liberal Party's ideas about anarchist communism was how non-hierarchical
decisions were to be made on a large scale. One can only assume that Flores Magón
would propose some system of workers' councils and neighborhood councils, linked
from the bottom up by the federalization of recallable delegates. At the end of
1915, Ricardo wrote an article in his newspaper entitled "New Life", in which he
playfully imagined some of the possible actions people might take in a random
city in the hours after a wave of revolution drove the capitalists out of the
city. In it, he envisions smooth and quick decisions made "when authority does
not interfere." It does not say exactly who makes these decisions, but in the
absence of authority it must be assumed that everyone concerned can have a say in
them. He envisions each neighborhood as an autonomous unit with an "expropriated
automobile" that unifies "decisions made in each urban district." If the
neighborhoods were to cooperate, someone would have to act as a spokesperson for
each neighborhood, what Ricardo calls "voluntary commissioners." For these
commissars to be truly anarchist, they would not be able to gain power over the
people, but Flores Magón never really explained how they would formally function.
The Zapatistas came up with a possible solution in the first days of their
uprising in 1994. "They made their way by walking"; only in practice could they
develop a theory. They continued the indigenous tradition of community
decision-making rooted in consensus. Anarchists in recent decades took
inspiration from indigenous groups, Quakers, and student assemblies and adopted
consensus decision-making, but most of Ricardo Flores Magón's contemporaries
advocated direct democracy, usually a two-thirds vote, with anyone free to join
or disassociate from the group at any time. Consensus allows all power to remain
with those most affected and eliminates the tyranny of the majority. The
Zapatistas adopted rotating delegates to coordinate between neighborhoods at the
municipal level and introduced additional delegates to coordinate municipalities
at the level of the entire territory. Through lengthy consensus processes in
which each proposal had to be ratified by all members of the community at the
most local level, they set a time limit of 10-14 days for coordination meetings
of Junta Buen Gobierno (Council of Good Government) delegates throughout the
territory. These extremely short terms in positions of influence ensured that no
one could gain power over anyone else, accumulate funds, or influence the balance
of resources in favor of individual communities. Another way the Zapatistas kept
these delegates accountable to their communities was by making them volunteers
and receiving compensation only from their neighbors who took over their domestic
duties in their absence, ensuring that they could be immediately recalled if they
transgressed against the mandate of their community. In other words,

At first glance, it seems that "leadership by obedience" is not at all compatible
with the anarchism that Ricardo Flores Magón espoused almost a century earlier.
In fact, anarchists were not so much against leadership as they were against rule
and domination. Magón would probably find much to admire in the Zapatista system;
delegates don't really have much power over their communities, but rather are
spokespeople for the collective will of their community. Unlike the politicians
Magón hated so much, Zapatista delegates cannot go against what ordinary people
demand. They are bound by decisions made by consensus at the lowest local level.
The Zapatistas have a motto: "Here the people command and the government obeys".
Probably contrary to the speed that Ricardo Flores Magón had in mind when he
envisioned decision-making in the absence of authority, anti-authoritarian
decisions must often be made in several meetings. For example, during cease-fire
negotiations with the Mexican state in the days after New Year's Day 1994, EZLN
officials made it clear that they would have to "suspend negotiations to consult
with the villages to which they are responsible." After returning home to their
villages, delegates were expected to "not talk but listen". The indigenous Mayans
have been making decisions collectively for generations without needing
instruction from left-wing intellectuals. Ultimately, the revolutionaries who
came to the mountains in 1982 learned more from the indigenous villagers than the
villagers learned from them. Yet the Zapatistas represent a synthesis of
indigenous practice and theory drawn from the political left. In speeches,
Subcomandante Marcos quoted Ricardo Flores Magón and noted that history repeats
itself, although the Zapatistas faced an even more determined and better equipped
enemy than Ricardo could have ever imagined. Still, it is doubtful that Flores
Magón could devise a more anti-authoritarian way of making decisions in such a
large area. Through years of trial and error, the Zapatistas have come up with a
form of decision-making that allows every person living in their autonomous zone
to participate significantly in the decisions that affect their lives.
Influential positions in Zapatista communities are not so much authorities as
expressions of the people's demands. There is no doubt that this practice is in
line with the anarchist sensibilities of Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican
Liberal Party. Through years of trial and error, the Zapatistas have come up with
a form of decision-making that allows every person living in their autonomous
zone to participate significantly in the decisions that affect their lives.
Influential positions in Zapatista communities are not so much authorities as
expressions of the people's demands. There is no doubt that this practice is in
line with the anarchist sensibilities of Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican
Liberal Party. Through years of trial and error, the Zapatistas have come up with
a form of decision-making that allows every person living in their autonomous
zone to participate significantly in the decisions that affect their lives.
Influential positions in Zapatista communities are not so much authorities as
expressions of the people's demands. There is no doubt that this practice is in
line with the anarchist sensibilities of Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican
Liberal Party.

The Zapatistas took advantage of a historical moment that Ricardo Flores Magón
was never able to take advantage of. Faced with the world's longest-lasting
one-party dictatorship and a capitalist system far more robust than in Magón's
time, the EZLN could not realize Magón's vision of a great overnight revolution.
As they marched forward in rebellion, they kept their ears firmly planted and
listened to the people in their communities for clues as to what to do next. It
is evident that the old plans of revolution were out of date; the indigenous
population suffering under the crushing weight of capitalism with its daily
humiliations could not wait for the glorious millennium upheaval. Their
clandestine waiting bought them time that the Mexican Liberal Party never had,
and once they started, they had to make up the theoretical paths envisioned by
Ricardo Flores Magón as they went along. The EZLN avoided the pitfalls of many
mass social movements by refusing to be drawn into party politics, continuing
Magón's distrust of politicians, and rejecting the state as an instrument of
power that could produce liberating results. Although this rejection of state
power must have been part of an evolving process, it left the Zapatistas in a
position that was difficult to co-opt. The massive expropriation of private
farms, previously worked by many native hands who received only ridiculous
compensation, could not be controlled by the PRI or any other party, and once
Zapatista territory was carved out, thousands of people who lived there refused
any contact with the government. Although they failed to abolish the state as
Magón would have liked, the Zapatistas created a dual government in spite of the
state that effectively rendered the state unnecessary. By working collectively
and building cooperative stores, farms, and means of transportation, they
continued the indigenous community traditions and at the same time came closer to
the anarchist dream of a stateless and classless society. Although Flores Magón
never fully developed a blueprint for what mass decision-making without authority
should look like, the Zapatistas captured the essence of anti-authoritarian
governance by establishing a system of power from below with instructed and
rotating delegates capable of coordinating resources across vast tracts of
mountainous terrain. The Zapatistas' experiment to build "a world that fits many
worlds" is an ongoing process, but within a few decades they have already
realized many of Ricardo Flores Magón's libertarian dreams. Although Flores Magón
never fully developed a blueprint for what mass decision-making without authority
should look like, the Zapatistas captured the essence of anti-authoritarian
governance by establishing a system of power from below with instructed and
rotating delegates capable of coordinating resources across vast tracts of
mountainous terrain. The Zapatistas' experiment to build "a world that fits many
worlds" is an ongoing process, but within a few decades they have already
realized many of Ricardo Flores Magón's libertarian dreams. Although Flores Magón
never fully developed a blueprint for what mass decision-making without authority
should look like, the Zapatistas captured the essence of anti-authoritarian
governance by establishing a system of power from below with instructed and
rotating delegates capable of coordinating resources across vast tracts of
mountainous terrain. The Zapatistas' experiment to build "a world that fits many
worlds" is an ongoing process, but within a few decades they have already
realized many of Ricardo Flores Magón's libertarian dreams.

Source (with notepad):
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ian-campbell-to-those-who-work-it-ricardo-flores-magon-and-the-ezln

https://www.afed.cz/text/7703/ricardo-flores-magon-a-ezln
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