McGreal
The Zapatista rebellion as postmodern revolution by: Seamus McGreal ABSTRACT Many journalists describe the Zapatistas' use of media events to influence international public opinion in favour of their organization and its aim to achieve indigenous land reform as the “first postmodern revolution” (Carrigan 2001, 417). These journalists are not simply using a catch phrase, the Zapatista rebellion can be understood to be a postmodern movement in three different ways of examining the social theory: 1) as a polemic against another theory, 2) as a mode of discourse, 3) and as a guide to action (Simmons 2004). The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) stands as a postmodern polemic against modernism, and globalization. It has asserted itself as an alternative and opposing political force to the Mexican government. The postmodern mode of discourse can explain how the EZLN uses language and new technologies, over guns, to communicate their group's objectives to the repressive Mexican state authorities and to the world at large. However, postmodernism can be a poor guide to action due to its aversion to ideology. The Zapatista rebellion as postmodern revolution is an ongoing struggle and may never achieve its full objectives. Introduction The following Louis Althusser paraphrase applies to the Zapatista struggle in Mexico. No ideologies preside over the interaction between the intervening discourse of the EZLN and the social processes of the state. The situation in Chiapas could always remain unalterably open to interpretation. However, this fluctuating political reality is ultimately the ideal marriage between the earlier Marxistinfluenced ideals of the radicals from the northeast of Mexico and the open politics of the Christian Mayans in Chiapas. Marxist activities intervene in and thereby change the ceaseless flux of interacting class and non-class processes comprising society. The effects of Marxist interventions, aimed at ending class exploitation and achieving communist society, will depend on all the other discursive interventions and all the non-discursive social processes with which they interact. No underlying causality and no telos govern that interaction. Social history is unalterably open. Althusser's Marxism must struggle within that openness; no modernist closure is available (Bertens and Natoli 2002, 11)
Historical background of the Zapatista rebellion It was Marxist theory, used as a radical guide to action, which first led the Zapatistas, from northeastern Mexico, into the troubled southeastern state of Chiapas, in 1984. This guerrilla group drew its inspiration from Lenin, Mao, and the romantic revolutionary, Che Guevara, as well as ideologies of Latin American left politics. They came to the Lacandon rainforest in Chiapas with ambitions to overthrow the Mexican government and to install a socialist people's republic (Carrigan 2001). They planned to inspire and lead an indigenous Mayan guerrilla force in this endeavour. The Bishop of San Cristobal, Samuel Ruiz, had been working with the Mayan communities in Chiapas for twenty years. He instructed them in community leadership and the Christian faith. When the radicals arrived, there was a culture clash. Their charismatic leader, called Marcos, explained that becoming “indianized” involved “an adjustment between our orthodox way of seeing the world in terms of bourgeois and proletarians to the community's worldview” (Hayden 2002, 39). The community's “worldview” was certainly
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